Ways to Introduce Predicting:
One way to draw children into a lesson on making predictions is to dress up. Perhaps you could be a weatherman for the lesson or maybe a detective looking for clues. After all, weathermen and detectives use clues to make predictions. Who makes predictions in their job? Engineers make predictions on how to best solve problems. Builders predict how much things will cost, and teachers predict how long it will take to complete certain tasks. Making predictions is an important task for everyday living.

Making Predictions Board

Mentor Texts I Love
Suddenly by Colin McNaughton
Colin McNaughton's books are really interesting. They are fractured fairy tales, so they work well for predicting. Kids have a little schema for the fairy tales as they know the original story as well as the characters. This provides a few clues to the reader, but there is the element of surprise that makes this skill important. The reader really must pay attention to the clues to predict. He has a series of books that work equally well, so an author study might even be a possibility. I've used Suddenly, Oops!, Preston's Goal, and Oomph!. The thing I like most about them is that you have natural stopping points for discussion.
A River Ran Wild by Lynne Cherry
Making predictions is also important for upper elementary students, and this book by Lynne Cherry includes deeper concepts and themes making it more appropriate for upper elementary readers. Plus, you can use it to highlight visualizing and author's craft as well. Students can use the information in the text to predict outcomes about what will happen to the river. This freebie in my store includes an organizer that you can use for this book and other higher level picture books.
Little Owl's Night by Divya Srinivasan
This next book was featured in my friend, Cathy's post over on The WISE Owl. I loved how she used picture cards for emergent readers to model. I thought this was a clever way to work on predicting. Concept sorts work well for many comprehension skills including cause/effect, fact/opinion, story elements, and beginning/middle/end.
That is NOT a Good Idea by Mo Willems
Mo Willems, author of the Elephant and Piggie series (which has now come to an end...sigh), wrote this book, and another bloggy friend, Wendy from Read with Me ABC wrote a blog post explaining a mentor text lesson she did with this book. I love that she included a wonderful FREEBIE with her post too, so take a moment, and check it out [HERE].
More Mentor Texts to Love
Of course, we know that mastering a skill takes lots of practice, so one mentor text is not enough. To help the teachers in my building, I put together a list of titles I found linked to ideas and resources. To access the links, you have to have the file opened on your computer versus a printable format of course, but I hope you find this helpful.
Have a happy day!

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