Drawing Inferences From A Text - Complete Reading Lesson with Activities (Grades 3 - 6)

This is a full lesson teaching how to draw inferences about what characters are thinking and feeling as well as what their motives and intentions are. It also covers making inferences from description, dialogue and action. This lesson is complete with all the activities you need to teach and consolidate this skill.

An inference is an idea that is based on clues and implied details. Authors do not always explicitly state their meaning. Instead they may provide enough details to enable the reader to make an inference. We can make inferences about almost any detail in a story. We may infer what characters are thinking and feeling as well as what their intentions and motives are. We may also infer the setting from the description, character traits from dialogue or what is happening from descriptions of action. Predictions are also a type of inference made about the future.

This lesson covers all these aspects of making inferences as well as how to support our inferences with evidence from the text. It is suitable for KS2 children and includes differentiated activities including reading and writing tasks designed to enable students to apply their understanding to their own work.

This resource is a PowerPoint presentation which includes all the information and activities you need to teach children how to make inferences.

PLEASE CHECK THE NOTES SECTIONS - The notes section also includes teaching tips, ideas and further explanations.

The presentation includes:
√ Learning objective
√ Three success criteria
√ Starter activity
√ AFL Questions
√ Teaching input - what are inferences and how can we draw them?
√ Multiple reading exercises
√ Multiple inference-making tasks for inferring feelings, thoughts, motives, intentions, the setting, character traits and events
√ Teaching input - predictions
√ Multiple prediction-making tasks
√ Guided/ whole class consolidation activities
√ Differentiated independent application activities (3 levels)
√ All answer slides
√ Plenary - AOL

PLEASE NOTE - Please look at the ‘notes’ section of the PowerPoint for additional information about each slide. These include teaching tips, ideas and further explanations.

This lesson is also suitable for being delivered remotely through online learning with some slight adaptations. It could combine very well with platforms such as Pear Deck and Nearpod.