Last week the students of 5/6 LF participated in an inferencing challenge.

With inferencing being a major target area for improvement in our reading data, it was important to start the focus on inferencing work with a fun and engaging activity to ‘hook’ the students into the activity of inferencing.

Students were partnered up and then completed either hiding a chocolate or writing a clue for where they had hidden the chocolate. After pairs had completed the hiding and creation of clues, they were able to go about using their inferencing skills to locate their chocolate.

Many laughs were had and chocolates enjoyed!

If you are interested in supporting the development of inferencing skills at home, here is some information:

Inferencing is loosely termed as a combination of prior knowledge and predicting. It is the reading comprehension skill of using what we already know to predict a logical outcome. It is often linked to questions regarding the emotions of characters within stories.

For instance:

If we see a person in the middle of the oval with their head in their hands after the recess bell, we know that they are upset and that something has likely happened. No one has told us this, we haven’t asked and we haven’t read this information anywhere, but we are able to determine this based on our previous experience of what upset people look like and by making a logical prediction.

The skill with inferencing is being able to transfer this into characters and information within text we read.

If you are interested in supporting some inferencing development at home, please let me know and I will send home some inferencing question stems that you could ask your child, while they are reading at home.

Here are some photos of last weeks activity and as always, thank you for the ongoing support!

Kind regards,

Mr Flanigan