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How to Make Inferences with Just a Dream

Making inferences is a challenging skill for most students, but never fear! This step by step lesson featuring Just a Dream will help you and your students master inferring. Check out the post to learn more.

Making inferences is a challenging skill for most students, but never fear! You can use this grab and go lesson to make teaching inferences a little easier for your students. Kids need clues to infer, and this book has lots of them! These step by step ideas will help make this skill automatic.

Text Examples for Inferences:

The book I’ve chosen for my lesson is by one of my favorite authors, Chris VanAllsburg. His writing style is perfect for writer’s craft lessons, visualizing, making inferences, predicting…you name it, and you can likely find one of his books that will fit every skill you need to model.

The title I chose is Just a Dream. It works very well for environmental studies and Earth Day. It is about a young boy who is troubled by his wasteful actions. He is haunted in his dreams which show him a glimpse of the future filled with pollution, clear cutting of trees, and wastefulness. Have you had dreams that teach you a lesson? I think we’ve all had crazy events wind up in our dreams. If you ask your students, who knows what they’ll share with you.

How to Make Inferences with Just a Dream

Introducing Inferences:

How to Make Inferences with Just a Dream

Naturally, this lesson needs to begin with discussions about dreams, the environment, or Earth day. I chose dreams thinking that it’d be a great lead into the focus of my lesson. After all, we can certainly infer why we dream as we do, right? In the prereading stage of the lesson, students will use these activities for schema building and vocabulary development. With my students, I like to use the text clues to discuss the words I’ve chosen. When I select vocabulary from a text, I’m aiming at tier 2 words that are higher utility, but not in the students speaking and writing vocabulary.

Using This Resource:

Once you’ve introduced the text to your students, the next step is to dig into the book. With this book, you can begin modeling inferences with the cover. Because making inferences can be abstract, beginning with pictures makes it more concrete to the student.  As you read the text, there are pages without words. You can use these if/when concrete examples are needed for group discussion.

Making inferences is a challenging skill for most students, but never fear! This step by step lesson featuring Just a Dream will help you and your students master inferring. Check out the post to learn more.

With mentor text lessons, I typically do a few examples with my students and gradually shift the load to them. There are seven examples included in the organizer, and I recommend group discussion to provide an opportunity for students to explain their inference. Sometimes we infer different things based upon our schema, so discussing our thinking may help students work out differing opinions.

Lesson Extension:

Making inferences is a challenging skill for most students, but never fear! This step by step lesson featuring Just a Dream will help you and your students master inferring. Check out the post to learn more.

Once your students have completed the during reading lesson, you can extend the themes of the book with writing. Students need to have opportunities to write in response to their reading, and these pages can be used for a quick write about the story, process writing explaining ways you can help the environment at school, or or as a persuasive piece explaining why it’s important to care for our Earth. Writing solidifies a student’s comprehension, and it’s very important to share and discuss the responses after too.

In addition to the pages described, the unit also has question task cards that can be used for group discussion or Scoot as well as this Earth Day lapbook. Your students can explore endangered animals, how plants help us, global warming, how they can get involved with protecting our planet, the history of Earth day, key vocabulary, and the 3 R’s (Reducing, Recycling, and Reusing Resources). This unit isn’t free any longer, but you can get all of these lesson options for ($4.50).

If you are interested in pinning these posts for later, you can follow the board below. It is the common board for all of the bloggers in the Reading Crew group.

Related Resources:

For other resources perfect for spring and Earth Day, check these mentor text sets and writing extensions.

If you’re curious about other mentor text lessons, search this site for mentor text lessons. I’ve written a TON about this topic. If you have any questions related to this lesson, please let me now. Have a wonderful Spring, and be sure to come back soon.

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Hello and Welcome to the Comprehension Connection Blog!

I’m Carla, the author of Comprehension Connection. I’m a recently retired Literacy Coach and TPT author. I’m a Wife to a great guy, Mom to two grown children and two fur babies. I’m a Virginia Blogger, a Travel Lover, a Coffee Drinker, and a Gal who loves All Things Techie.

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