Comic Strip Inferencing

As a teacher, I think it is so important to make sure your teaching is fun, interactive and exciting for your students.  Therefore, I am always trying to find new ways to be inspired so that I don't always use the same lessons in the classroom.

One of the hardest reading strategies for me to teach is inferencing.  A few years ago, I was at home with my own kids and my son asked to read the comics.  Of course, I quickly found them in our Sunday paper and handed them over.   He started to read them and started to ask questions about what was the purpose behind some of them.  As we discussed them, I realized at the age of 5 he really didn't have the background knowledge (schema) to read between the lines.  That's when the lightbulb hit...my 6th graders could do this AND it would be a fun, interactive way to teach them how to infer.  Quickly, I read all of them and came up with a teaching plan.

The next day, I started explaining to my students that in order to infer, you need to read the text and take that textual evidence and add it to what you already know about the topic (schema).  Then, you can make an inference based on putting those two things together.

(textual evidence + background knowledge (schema) = inference)

Here's an example of what we did.  Using this comic, first we read the comic.  We talked about what the words said,  "Pssst, how do you turn these things on?".   Next, we looked at the picture and discussed what we saw, book, student asking another a question, "back to school" on the board, etc..  Using all of those pieces of information (also known as textual evidence) we asked ourselves what do we know about "turning things on", what kids do and don't do in the summer and books?  We then came up with the inference that the young man in the comic must not realize that not all things are devices to be turned on, or that he has lack of experience with textbooks or that all summer he did not pick up a book rather he played with devices all summer long.

My students LOVED reading various comics and practicing their inference skills.  I hope this quick idea leads into something creative for you and your classroom!

My next post will be about how my kids created their own comics!