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Structured Approach to Inferencing

Tags

ELA: Reading All Ages Strategy

Skills

Flexible Thinking Verbal Reasoning Abstract Reasoning

Structured Approach to Inferencing

If your student skips over or doesn't understand complex ideas while reading independently

Instruction And Practice

  1. Objective: Students will apply purposeful inferencing strategies to help them make sense of confusing or complex parts of their reading.
  2. Students can get through difficult parts of a reading when they take a more deliberate, stepped approach. The three strategies on the next slide can help students read more selectively, consider the big picture and context clues, and ask themselves questions that will help them make sense of confusing parts or unfamiliar concepts or words.

*print* For Students: What To Do When The Reading Doesn't Make Sense

  1. Skip and Return: Pass over the confusing sentence/part and continue reading to the end of the paragraph. Then go back and re-read for meaning with the context of the full paragraph in mind.
  2. What Makes Sense: Ask yourself, "What would make sense here?" or "What am I missing?" Perhaps you lost track of which character was speaking. Perhaps the tense changed and now they are talking about a past event rather than the present situation.
  3. Identify the Main Problem: Step back from the specific sentence that is confusing and ask yourself what is the big issue or concern in the chapter. How could this new (confusing) information be related to or fit into the overarching problem?

Why It Works (the Science Of Learning)!

Students will need to be comfortable that they might not understand every detail in the story they are reading. It will be important for them to know when it will be okay to move on and when they need to go back and figure out the confusing information.