Inferring in First Grade - Good Books to Teach Making Inferences

I found a good book to help my students learn how good readers make inferences. I used it to reinforce the idea that pictures can help us infer meaning and text can help us infer meaning.  I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen is a wonderfully unique book with a surprise ending (spoiler alert - the rabbit does not make it).

One reason that I like it is that it appeals to certain students that may not be engaged in other books. To be honest the first time that I read it, I was a little troubled by the ending. There is not too much text in this book, so many first graders can read it. The author did an amazing job of conveying his message with simple yet precise text.

When I heard that Jon Klassen's book, This Is Not My Hat, won the Caldecott, I had to get it.  In this slightly dark tale, a tiny fish steals a hat knowing that it is wrong. My students started making inferences about the ending right away! They even were making inferences about the author's message.


Click Here for a free copy of the graphic organizer.

Questioning - Comprehension Strategy

Now we are focusing on the comprehension strategy questioning. We are asking questions before, during, and after reading. A few of my favorite books to reinforce this strategy are...

Charlie Anderson by Barbara Abercrombie. It's a cute story that will get your students questioning. Wednesday's Surprise by Even Bunting has an ending that many of your students might not see coming. A lot of Eve Bunting's books work well to model the questioning strategy, although many are more appropriate for upper elementary school students.

 Before reading a book, my students look at the cover and the title and write down some questions they have before reading the book. Click here for a copy of this, one with lines, one without lines.

Having the question words at the top of the page, will assist students with writing their questions. Click here for a free copy.

Visualizing

After reading the book, Hello Ocean, my students filled out this graphic organizer.
Click here for a free copy of the graphic organizer.

Comprehension Strategy - Visualizing

We just finished up a unit on the comprehension strategy - Visualizing. My go-to professional resources for this topic are Strategies that Work by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis and Debbie Miller's Reading with Meaning:Teaching Comprehension in the Primary Grade.

Some online resources that I use include:


http://reading.ecb.org/teacher/visualizing/index.html
http://www.busyteacherscafe.com/literacy

http://www.mauryk12.org/Literacy/reading%20mentor%20texts.htm

These two websites can be shown whole class on a whiteboard or in a computer lab:

http://www.pspb.org/blueribbon/games/visual/Visual.html 

http://reading.ecb.org/teacher/visualizing/index.html

 


These are some of the books that I used to teach the unit: