Inferencing asks students to look at a situation or character and determine meaning that is not explicitly stated. For this activity, students will draw from their own experience and what they already know in order to arrive at reasonable conclusions about Auggie. Teachers may also ask students to complete an inferencing worksheet for another character in the novel. They may also scaffold worksheets for students by including examples, quotes, and more!
For more templates, check out our inferencing worksheet templates!
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Due Date:
Objective: Complete a worksheet illustrating inferences about Wonder, using examples from the text.
Student Instructions:
First, teach students that making an inference involves using their personal experiences and knowledge to interpret something in the text that is not explicitly stated. This is obviously a difficult concept to understand.
Create some inferences with the whole class about the main character, Auggie so that students can see how to do it. Model the thinking, questioning, and inferring that is expected out of an educated reader.
Students will have very disparate levels of success when it comes to inferencing, so you will need to scaffold. Some students might need quotes from the text to help them understand, others might need descriptions as well, and others might be able to do it on their own.
Students of all levels will benefit from creating a visual to help make their inferences more concrete. Students should use evidence from the text to support their inferences.
An inference is a piece of information that a student learns by studying a situation in a text and applying their own knowledge. An inference is not specifically stated but the students have to process information to understand what they are reading.
If a student has a wide variety of personal experiences, he or she will be better able to understand the variety of things that could occur in a novel. We all bring our personal experiences to a text, and we use these experiences to make inferences.