Observing and Inferring while Reading with Your Child

I often get asked the questions from new moms, “How do I read to my child?” “Are there certain things I should do?”
 
Recently, I was having a conversation with one of my friends and it got me thinking about how we can begin to plant seeds of higher level thinking in our kids even as young as two and three.

In the mid to upper elementary students will be required to notice tiny details in text and then use those details to make complex inferences about characters, or setting, or theme. These skills are hard and often students who fall behind in reading have issues with making inferences.
 
Over my time in working with students who struggle, I’ve realized that not only do they struggle with using those details to make the actual inference, but they struggle with simply noticing the details in text. One strategy that I’ve started using with students is to practice their “observation” skills first. What do you observe in the text? What do you notice?   And I begin this process by first taking the text away and observing a picture.
 
For example, take a look at this Norma Rockwell painting.
Using only your skill of observation make a mental list of everything you see.  ​

​Your list may start with things like:
girl
bench
door
two people in a separate room
​

Once you list the obvious drill down even further. Zoom in to specific areas of the painting and get specific.  For example if you zoomed in on the girl you might say:
 
hair
ribbon
socks
knees
black eye

 
 
But then we need to take it one step further. Let’s get descriptive about what we see in case we weren’t at first.
 
messy hair
untied ribbon
slouchy stretched out socks
bruised knees / bandaged knee
black eye
These are the details that will lead you to making inferences. (hair, ribbon, socks, and knees won’t allow you to make inferences that mean anything.)
 
 
Now that you’ve spent some time noticing. Tell me what do you think is going on in the picture?
This “thinking” part will be your inference.

​Think about the following questions:

1. What’s going on in the picture? (What makes you say that? What evidence in the text that you can observed made you say that?)
2. How is the little girl feeling? How do you know?
3. Why might she be feeling this?
4. What is the time period? How do you know?
5. Who do you think she got in a fight with?
6. Where is the other kid?
7. Who are the other two people?
8. If you had to give this painting a title, what would it be?

 
This process is helping in getting kids to notice and observe the details first and then use those details to make logical inferences.
 
Reading With Your Child
This same process can be used to get young kids to start thinking higher level.
For example, when reading a book to a young child pause on a page and ask some of the following questions:
 
*What’s happening in this picture? or Oh no! What happened?
*How does she feel? (If the child is able to correctly answer the question- follow it up with: You’re right. She’s sad. Look at her tears rolling down her face. Look at her lip puckering out.) Point out the “evidence” in the text to them. When they get older you will be able to ask them  How do you know?
*Why is she sad?
*Is it daytime or nighttime? How do you know? Yes it’s nighttime. Look at how dark it is. The moon is out. The moon comes out in the night time and the sun is out in the day time. 
*What’s going to happen next?
 
Simple questions like this can help young children develop vocabulary and higher level thinking skills.
 
Some great books for making inferences with young children are wordless/nearly wordless board books such as the David books and the Carl books. ​ However, any page of a book can work.