Chapter 5 post

Chapter five gave me some great ideas about how to get students to realize that they are making inferences and how important inferencing is to comprehending a text. Since people make inferences all the time in everyday life they probably aren't aware of their inferencing when reading. In the case of young people, they need us to fine tune their inferencing and help those along who cant make the connections. In life the ability to realize what motivates people, and understanding peoples actions around one makes one more likely to succeed. As a teacher I will explain to my students how being able to inference a text is like being able to read people, in a social manner, this should get all students immediate attention. I liked the list of what and how skilled readers make inferences, I wouldn't put this list on my classroom wall and say "be like this", but I would keep it as signs to look for and behaviors to encourage. I suspect that pages 69 through 71 are teaching gold. Particularly, I remember teachers doing #2 when I was younger, that is read very intriguing passages from a book and have the class discuss what they thought was going on in the passage, then reveal the answer. But my favorite was the 5 minute mysteries, the teacher would read it aloud and the whole class would try to figure it out, every one got involved, even the bad kids. I was enlightened by # 4, when for the first time I realized that while I read ahead of the book I was teaching, I should use what I was reading currently to create some discussions that would correspond throughout a text, so that my teaching of the text had a clearer focus and 'came together' at the end.