Making Inferences

When readers apply this strategy, they infer meanings by using information from the text and their existing knowledge to fill in bits of information that are not explicitly stated in the text. No text is ever fully explicit, and thus readers must constantly make inferences to understand what they are reading. By teaching students to make inferences, you are helping them learn to use their existing knowledge along with the information in the text to build meaning.

In Digging Reading, students are taught to make an inference by combining their prior knowledge with clues from the text. Students first learn to recognize an inference. Then they make inferences while reading Bird Boy, citing clues from the text to explain their answers.