Inference

We looked at higher order reading skills today, in relation to language comprehension. One of the big things was inference and we did a variety of activities linked to encouraging children to infer from the text.

One of the tasks was to come up with a sentence, just a simple sentence, which could be used to launch a debate. It was quite illuminating and rather amusing, as our first resposes seemed to follow a pattern. Some people always thought the worst, some tended to go for a nicer angle and others tried to infer something particularly humous lol.
Our sentence was something like: "He ran swiftly along the road, carrying a bag." Some people thought he was theft, others that he was late for his train. Someone said he could be trying to return the bag to someone. Another that he was carrying ice-cream home from the supermarket and didn't want it to melt lol.
One of the other sentences we came up with was something like: "She stood alone on the street corner, on a dark, cold night." You can just imagine the first idea to pop into some heads lol!

I suppose, inference is something we all do without thinking about it. When you read a headline in a newspaper or a tag line to something, often they are not completely clear and yet we all make an assumption - a prediction or a judgement - as to what it meant. :)

I think sessions which bring in that sort of skill would be really interesting to teach. Once the children develop some confidence with it, I'm sure you could have some very lively exchanges and debates about something so simple as a short sentence. Pretty groovy, to me at least lol. :)