Differentiated Instruction for Making Inferences!

We have been fully immersed in making inferences in my first grade classroom over the past two weeks!  It is my all time FAVORITE comprehension strategy to teach! It is also, in my opinion, the most difficult strategy to teach little ones.  Drawing conclusions and making an inference involve a high level of critical thinking skills and application to prior knowledge. In order to be successful at this strategy, teachers in the primary classroom need to provide a great deal of support and scaffolding to ensure students reach success.

If you know me even a *tiny, tiny* bit as a teacher, it goes without saying that I am a HUGE believer of small group instruction and differentiation.  If concepts and content are not brought to a child’s individual learning level, the child will never rise above his or her frustration.  On the other hand, if a child who already has a great deal of skills is not challenged, or, if the child’s learning boundaries are not gently pushed, the child will never escape boredom.  

To help teach, practice, and apply inference skills within our small groups over the past couple weeks, I created a new product that I am SO excited to share with you: 
Eeekkk! That’s me, squealing with excitement over the crazy progress my kiddos have made when learning how to draw conclusions and infer character emotions and actions.  The pack contains 10 engaging stories that are each differentiated into THREE tiers of complexity!  This makes differentiation effortless and efficient!  The levels increase in their text length, written response expectations, and critical thinking skills.  
Let’s take a look at each level:
 As the levels increase, the picture support decreases, therefore requiring students to depend more on the textual evidence within the passage to draw their conclusions.

Here’s an overview of how to use this pack.  It contains posters for inferences, thinking stems, and character emotion anchor charts for students to use for support. You pick the level that is appropriate for each of your small groups. Choose to use all three levels, one, or a mixture – the choice is yours!

Here are some student work examples of my kiddos making inferences!

I plan on making more differentiated reading passages packs for other comprehension strategies as well!  The ease of using this pack and the effectiveness of being able to have all of my students read and discuss the same story, but at their own level, was priceless!  
After small groups, we were all able to equally discuss and participate in a whole class conversation about the story we had read that day! #myteacherheartishappy
I hope you enjoyed reading and learning about my new differentiated reading passages pack and how I used these in my classroom.  You can find this new pack by clicking HERE or clicking on the picture below:

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2 Comments

  1. I can't wait to purchase this reading passage pack and the others to come! You are amazing, I don't know when you find the time to create all of your fantastic resources! Thanks for being such an inspiration, I always look forward to reading your blog posts! I wish I could spend a day in your classroom, I just know it would be a wonderful experience and I would get do many ideas! Your students are very lucky to have you! 🙂

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