Look at this picture.
What can you guess about the character that it belongs to?
This is exactly the question I asked a group of second graders and when I did, they astutely called upon their background knowledge to tell me some very smart things. The character is a boy because girls don’t wear swim trunks. The character is not a grown-up because the trunks are not big enough to fit someone older than seven or eight. The notebook is small and portable (they really used that word) so the character carries it with him. The character must be at the beach because you use a bucket and shovel to dig in the sand.
In order to draw these conclusions, these second graders had to infer. Most teachers recognize inferring as an important, higher level comprehension skill but feel stuck when it comes to knowing how to teach it. When we started here and pointed out that inferring is when you take information and put it together with what you know from your prior experiences and draw a conclusion, somehow, it seemed so much easier than it had in the past. As we began to read the Nate the Great and the Boring Beach Bag together, we stopped every so often to talk (the text written in brown under the “clues” column is text that comes directly from the book) and think about what we knew (background knowledge column) without being told (inference column) and it was amazing how the students could “see between the lines.” Download this lesson: Did you know you knew that?
