…by starting immediately.
It’s the first day of summer vacation and yes, we already started the first series for the summer. Junie B., here we come! G ended Kindergarten as a pretty strong level L, but her inferencing needs some work. I wanted to choose a series that was funny, because she needs funny. And I wanted her to feel connected with the character-one who is pretty opinionated and outspoken-just like G is. But, here, in this series, Junie B. is outspoken in school! (Hubba wha?) G is certainly not the same kind of kid in school as she is out of school it seems. Which is really the norm from my experience, but it really bothers me!
The series is a level M, which means that she will need support. I read the first half of first book aloud, and now I feel like I have a sore throat, but I could tell that it was worth it, and she is totally into it. What’s cool is that the book has 3 paper dolls, which I was reminded, “could be used to act out the stories after we read them”. And we will.
Fun posts about what we do with the series to boost comprehension to come. Happy summer reading! What books will you choose?
bigglittleg.com 
For helping kids better understand what it really means to infer, I have found that starting out with acting out emotions bridges that gap rather nicely. I would start by walking into a room, head down, frowning, sighing, rounded shoulders and then let the kids guess how I’m feeling. Continue to identify all the ways I communicated my feelings without saying a word! Then I would begin to explain that When we are reading we have to be detectives, trying to understand what the author wants us to know, what a character might be “saying” without coming out and saying it. As a class we would continue by having the kids write down what they intended to have us infer on an index card and act it out. Then moved on to just taking snippets of text, if you can choose texts your children are already familiar with this works even better, that way they know the characters and the plot already and can just focus in on part of the text for this one purpose.
These sound like a great ideas! Thanks for sharing.
Amazing Danielle! What a great blog! Thanks for sharing …. I will definitely follow this journey!
Yay! 🙂