Hi y’all! It’s Katie “Texas” from Rock and Teach. I’m a fourth grade teacher in the great state of Texas. I’m so excited to be guest blogging for the amazing Rachel Lynette! The topic I’ll be blogging about today is inferences. Sometimes I wonder why forming an inference is so hard for students. Evidence + Schema = Inference… That should be clear as day to our students, right?

How are your students' inferencing skills? I'm guessing they aren't great, since many students struggle with making inferences. Our guest blogger shares about her "Think Deep Thursday" strategy, where she zeroes in on inferences and helps her students infer successfully!

WRONG!

To form an inference or draw a conclusion, students have to think DEEP. They need to be able to call on previous knowledge (schema). Unfortunately, sometimes our students don’t have a lot of related background knowledge or life experiences, which is where their schema comes from. To help build strong inferences and deep thinking in my classroom, every Thursday is “Think Deep Thursday.” When my students enter the classroom, a message is waiting for them on the board. The message includes a scenario, some “evidence,” and a sentence stem to help them write an inference. After weeks of practice, I have seen SO much improvement in my students’ ability to think DEEP. Today, I want share with you how I started “Think Deep Thursday” in my classroom and provide some tips and tricks so you can start it in your classroom!

SET UP

All you need to start “Think Deep Thursday” is a scenario (text), a plastic baggie (for evidence), and sticky notes (optional) on which students can write their inferences. I write my scenarios on my white board, but you could easily type them up and display them on a projector or a SMARTBoard!

My first Think Deep Thursday was a disaster. I had my situation on the board: “Yesterday, I went to my BFF’s house. What can you INFER about my friend based on these items from her house?” The items included Vitamin C, mucus medicine, and dirty tissues. I KNEW my kids were about to rock out with a thoughtful inference. Out of 23 students, THREE correctly inferred that my friend was sick. Other students wrote things about my friend being nice and telling jokes… I was speechless. I could not understand what happened!

After some wise feedback from my husband, I realized I had started with too abstract of an inference for my kids. I needed to build up to that rather than start with that. That’s why my first tip for this is to START SLOW. Make the first couple inference scenarios incredibly obvious. This builds confidence!

As I said if you go too abstract with an inference, then you’re not going to get the deep thinking you’re looking for. After my first disaster inference, I knew I needed to find items with which ALL of my students were familiar. I decided to have my students infer what holiday I had decorated for at my house (Halloween). To do this, I put every orange and black item I could find, as well as pictures of ghosts and pumpkins, into my “evidence bag.” That day was an inferencing success, as all my students recognized the familiar colors and items as Halloween décor.

Another successful Think Deep Thursday occurred when I had students infer about the errand I had run the previous afternoon. I included a Walmart receipt and a few coins in my “evidence bag.” Students were able to read the items on the list, see that I had been to Walmart, and notice I had money in the bag. The entire class inferred I had been grocery shopping. I was one proud teacher!

After several successful Think Deep Thursdays with inference evidence bags, I had my students start inferring about characters. Their first inference about characters, or in this case, a real person, was made during Dia de Los Muertos. To celebrate the Mexican holiday, I made an altar to my dad, who passed away the previous year.

In my altar, I included pictures of my dad and his brothers as children (wearing cowboy hats), a few pictures of my family at our family ranch (my dad was holding a cowboy hat in one hand and a baby longhorn in the other), and a recent photo of the whole family. My food offering included Oreos, M&Ms, and all the leftover chocolate Halloween candy I could find in my house! I decorated the altar with battery-operated candles, sugar skulls, mini paper picadors, and yellow daisies. The finished product was gorgeous.

I took the altar to school on Monday and let my students know they’d be making inferences about my dad based on what I included on the altar. I gave my students a graphic organizer and had them write down three observations from which they would draw one inference. We focused on the photos and the food.

For the photos I asked them to write down who they saw in the photographs (family), the setting (outside, on a farm, by a barn), and the other items they saw (horses, cowboy hats, fence, cow). Can you guess what their inference was? They inferred my dad was a COWBOY! And gosh, they were right! My dad raised Texas Longhorns. He had a passion for the business and had built up a beautiful herd.

The students were equally successful with making an inference based on the food included in the altar – they inferred that my dad liked chocolate! CORRECT! He might have been the biggest chocoholic in all of Texas… And he definitely passed that on to me!

When students are asked to make inferences and form conclusions on tests, they’re probably not going to have a fun “evidence bag” or an altar to observe from which they can form their inference. So my second-to-last tip is take this activity in whatever direction you need to ensure student success. Eventually, my “Think Deep Thursdays” will look more like the questions my students will see on state assessments. I’m confident they will be successful with these because they are coming with a strong foundation with inferencing!

If you ignore every other tip above, don’t ignore this one!! Make sure your students are JUSTIFYING their inferences. I never let my students present an inference or conclusion unless there is a “BECAUSE” after it. Having students justify their thinking forces them to actually think DEEP. And that’s the whole point!

I truly hope you’ll start “Think Deep Thursday” in your classroom! My students absolutely love this activity, and since it’s waiting on the board when they walk in, it doesn’t take up a lot of class time.

In case you don’t know where to start, I have a few products to help you. I’ve created a Morning Message: Spiral of Essential Skills pack in my TPT store. Mondays review main idea, Tuesdays review character traits, Wednesdays review theme, Thursdays are inferences, and Fridays are context clues. Try out a week for free! I’d love to hear your feedback!

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to see more about the things I do in my classroom, please visit my blog Rock and Teach or follow me on Instagram!

Happy Teaching!

Katie Jefferies has been teaching fourth grade for five years in Texas. In 2012 she was voted “Rookie Teacher of the Year” for Texas City ISD, and in 2015 she was voted “Teacher of the Year” at her school in Galveston, Texas. Katie has a passion for creating engaging and rigorous activities to reach all learners. Find her products in her Teachers Pay Teachers Store, Katie Texas – Rock and Teach.

Comments

angeland says

December 7, 2015 at 3:37 am

I love your Think Deep Thursday tips. Don't suppose you could package the interence ones together in a set in your store? I only work on that with the students who need it as an itinerant teacher and I usually only see the kids once a week.

I am Bullyproof Music - Lessia Bonn says

December 10, 2015 at 11:18 pm

I LOVE this! I raised two boys who are very "boy." The oldest came home from college once with his best friend. His friend overheard us talking and said, "Wow, you guys go deep!" I swear, the entire time we were raising our kids, people kept saying, "You guys go so DEEP!" And here we thought we were just having normal conversations. We certainly laughed a lot.
In this day and age, kids need to go deep more than ever. They need to learn to look behind the curtain so they won't get duped.
I applaud your word and your great post!

Jess says

April 25, 2016 at 9:18 am

Do the students take turns taking out the pieces of the bag, then sit down? I am trying to figure out how to manage with my 24 students. I love this idea!

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