Chapter Five: Learning to Make an Inference

     This chapter has several good ideas that will help teach students how to make inferences. This is something that came quite naturally to me, so I would really have no idea how to teach this. There was certainly a vast difference in the attention and comprehension of the activity between the two classrooms. Beers first showed the 'movie theater' lesson to eleventh grade honors students, then she had to show the same lesson to C and D students. Their responses were very different, and unfortunately what I expected before reading their actual responses.

      I really liked Beers' idea of having the students kind of dissect cartoons/comic strips. This is such a good idea because kids know to laugh and they "get it", but how do you explain why you "got it" or how you automatically understand the joke? I think this is a great idea because kids can laugh and look at something that they relate to, but they can also learn from it as well. The last part of the chapter with the bumper stickers was pretty interesting, too. -Katie May