Summary of lesson plan:
In this lesson, students use an interactive website as detectives to solve a number of simple cases. The website also reads what is on the page, ensuring that all children can play. It is a simple, yet fun lesson in learning about inference.
Australian Curriculum Links:
- Year 2 – Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning and begin to analyse texts by drawing on growing knowledge of context, language and visual features and print and multimodal text structures (ACELY1670).
- Year 3 – Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning and begin to evaluate texts by drawing on a growing knowledge of context, text structures and language features (ACELY1680).
- Year 4 – Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning to expand content knowledge, integrating and linking ideas and analysing and evaluating texts (ACELY1692).
Lesson plan sequence:
Introduction:
- Explain to the children that today we are going to look at a strategy in reading that is called ‘INFERRING’.
- Explain that inference is simply trying to work out something from the text when it hasn’t been explained. You need to use the clues to help you solve them.
- If you have some magnifying glasses, it would be great to hand these out to get the kids thinking about being detectives.
- Explain to the kids that good readers use the clues in the text, along with their thinking skills (schema) to make great predictions about what is happening in the text.
- Create an anchor chart for your students to refer to. There are heaps here for you to refer to as well:
Body:
- At this point, you may like to show a picture like this and ask a bunch of questions:
- Ask things like:
- What time of the year is this? And ask them to explain why they think that.
- Who would win the water fight and why?
- Where are they and why?
- To reinforce with the kids, explain to them that they are inferring all these answers based on what they have seen and their own knowledge.
- You may like to show a couple more pictures at this point to reinforce the skill.
- When you are satisfied that your students ‘get it’, explain to them that they are going to put on their detective hats now and play a game online.
- Model how to use the first case of:
- Model how to record your ability to infer by creating an Inference / Schema table (E.g. Inference will be ‘the table was bumped’ and schema will be ‘therefore I know a vase may wobble off it and fall to the ground, causing it to break’. Or use the one attached below.
Conclusion:
- Bring all students back on the floor/mat and discuss their tables.
- Go back through the Detective Game and ask students to verbally tell you the inference and schema to check how well they picked it up.
- Relate what they have done in class to something in the outside world, e.g. A policeman would have to use lots of clues. Or, an ambulance officer would need to use clues when they turn up at a house.
Assessment:
- Collect Inference/Schema Tables to use as evidence.
- Anecdotal notes on student discussions and additions while on computers.
Resources:
- Computer Lab / 1 Device per student
- Pencils / Pens
- http://www.pspb.org/blueribbon/games/detective/DetectiveGame.html
- http://www.pinterest.com/dumpman/inference-reading-anchor-chart/
- Inference – Schema Table (DOC)
[wpfp-link]
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