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Kentucky Teacher Shares Strategies for
Teaching Comprehension Questions
Part 4: Inferential Question
Comprehension Questions Bookmark
To help remind students of these strategies for answering the comprehension questions, download and print a free Comprehension Questions Bookmark for your students.
The bookmark can help students focus on what is required to answer each type of question correctly.
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Continuing our series on teaching the comprehension questions, this month we provide a strategy for teaching students to answer the inferential questions (question 4).
Most Read Naturally stories include five common types of comprehension questions: main idea, literal, vocabulary, inferential, and short answer. It is important for students to understand the different types of questions and have strategies to answer them.
Angela Walker Foster from Anderson County Schools in Lawrenceburg, KY has provided a great instructional strategy for teaching the comprehension questions, and we're pleased to share the strategy with you.
Inferential: Look for the clues the author left behind so that you can put them together to find (infer) the answer.
- Begin this lesson with a guessing game. Pretend you are an animal, and provide the students hints or clues as to which animal. For example: “I am very large. I have big ears. I have a long trunk. What animal am I?”
- Then talk to the students about how an author leaves clues in their stories. Explain how those clues can be put together to draw additional information from the passage.
- Now, give each student the same five stories.
- Display what inference means, and highlight the key words you want the students to remember: "clues the author left behind," "you can find (infer) the answer.”
- Read the first story with the class out loud.
- After reading the story, examine the inferential question. Search the section of the story related to topic of the question looking for the clues. Circle the clues as you find them.
- Discuss the clues, and determine what they mean.
- As a group, choose the correct answer.
- Repeat steps 4–8 for the second story. The object is for the students to understand how you arrive at the answer. This is a think-aloud exercise.
- Have the students try it themselves for the third story.
- Talk about the different choices after they pick their answer(s).
- Go through each step to make sure they find the clues the author left behind.
- Repeat steps 10–12 for the fourth story.
- Use the fifth story as an assessment to determine whether the students understand how to find the answer to an inferential question. If they are still unable to find the answer, choose a few more stories to practice as a group. As with any new lesson, some students will need more practice and instruction than other students.
Part 1: Teaching the Main-Idea Question
Part 2: Teaching the Literal Question
Part 3: Teaching the Vocabulary Question
Part 5: Teaching the Short-Answer Question
