Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Predict: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall


The fifth strategy is prediction. When I first started teaching prediction and inference, I had trouble helping my students discern between the two.  In fact, I have noticed that even reading teacher instruction books do not make a big distinction between the two.
Both inference and prediction invoke similar thinking skills, but the difference is in perspective.  Inference is making decisions and gaining insight into event and character information that has already been written in the text.  Prediction is taking what has happened so far, based on clues, foreshadowing, and evaluating the characters’ character, and then deciding what the next logical scenario might be. Inference mostly involves judging characters, and prediction involves future events.
Pauses in reading help us think about what we have read which is a key element of comprehension. It gives us time to reflect upon or summarize what has happened so far, and it allows us time to evaluate what we have read with what we know to be true, to determine what might happen next.  Some authors such as O. Henry like to play with us and twist the ending, but most preschool stories are fairly predictable even for the youngest preschooler.
To start implementing this strategy, begin with a picture walk.   A picture walk through a book is just what it sounds like. Take a book and predict what the story will be about just by looking at the pictures. Then read the book. The interesting thing about predicting is you can only use this strategy once per book because after the mystery has been revealed, there is nothing more to predict. 
Another way to use this strategy is to read a book with a simple plot, and before you get to the ending, have your child predict the ending. Predicting forces us to think about what we are reading, and that’s what comprehension is all about.  Imparting reading comprehension strategies to children is not an enigma if you know a few tricks of the trade.

This is the School Marm,
 Ringing her bell. 
School’s out!

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