A Borrowed Idea

While going through my undergrad classes my professors always told us that teaching is full of begging, borrowing, and stealing. I am game for that as long as you give credit to those who you might borrow from. 

As soon as I saw Lindsay @ My Life as a Fifth Grade Teacher's post about trashy readers, I knew it was exactly what I needed to do with my students. We had already talked about inferencing some earlier this year, but they were still struggling with it. I started my lesson by telling my students that I was going to teach them how to be "trashy readers". I wish I could have taken a picture of their faces because they could not believe I was going to teach them how to do that. I used the same conversation as Lindsay that she talks about in this post. I told them that I knew I had a neighbor because I always saw their trashcan in the street on Thursday, but I had never actually seen them in person. I continued by telling them that I got a little snoopy and searched through their trash to learn more about them. By this point they were totally grossed out and they informed me that I did something illegal. I just had to giggle and I continued to play along with it. I asked my students to talk with a partner about what an inference is. I explained to them that their definition for inference should have schema and evidence in it. 

Then we began to go through the "trash" or evidence as we started calling it. We recorded our findings on our chart and the students had a copy that they were filling in too. Then we used our schema to write down what we already knew about the evidence. Using both the evidence and schema we wrote down, we were then able to create our inferences. I thought that it went really great and it seemed to finally click with my students. During the 2nd hour that I had them, I used a children's book to read to them and I gave them the evidence and they had to fill in the other two squares. Tomorrow we are going to use our weekly story to make some inferences as well.

I just love when lessons go wonderfully and students finally get it!