Inferring Character Traits

The latest reading strategy that we are concentrating on is inferring.  While good readers use multiple reading strategies at a time, we focus on one at a time for teaching purposes, so that we can expand and polish the students' skills.  The students have identified that when you infer, the reader locates clues that have been implanted by the author explicitly or implicitly, and use his/her schema to create conclusions about a character and/or situation.  Shown here is my class using character trait cards that I created.  They put pieces together to match adjectives with their definitions.  This facilitates vocabulary development, and in this case, we were inferring qualities about characters that we were reading about, citing evidence from the text.  This is a great skill to hone, so I recommend that they practice this at home with their daily reading. They also practice this in the classroom, independently, in their weekly reader's responses.  Please see the new anchor charts that have been posted in both the literacy and math sections of the Anchor Chart Library page of this site.