inferring | Catching Readers Before They Fall

One thing I do during an interactive read aloud is have kids “be the character”. I stop at a point in the text where the character is feeling an emotion or anticipating an upcoming event. I ask the kids to “pull out their masks” (I model pulling out an imaginary mask from my sock.) and put on their mask to be the character. I look to see them show what the character is feeling on their faces. Then I invite children who want to “be the character” to say what they are thinking or feeling (as the character). After we’ve shared briefly, I tell them to put their masks away (they put them back in their sock as a signal to come back to focus on the book) and we continue reading the book.

I’ve always thought this was a great way for me to teach inferring, engage children with the characters and events in the book, to predict and to show how readers read beyond the text. After reading Peter Johnston’s, Opening Minds (Chapter 6), I now see that having children imagine that they are experiencing another’s feelings or emotions is much bigger than all of that. It is also a key component in building social imagination.

Much of what happens in texts, personal interactions, academics and the “real world” happens inside our heads. Teaching children to imagine what is going on “behind the scenes”, in essence, is a highly important task. And how can we neglect this? As Johnston says, “social imagination is the foundation of civil society.” Children (and adults) need to be able to understand what others are feeling, to read people’s faces and expressions, to imagine different perspectives, to make sense of abstract ideas, and to reason through this. While social imagination may not show up in a list of state standards, it’s a critical piece of education that we cannot leave out.

I’m looking forward to exploring this more in the upcoming school year. I see possibility in using this as we role-play problems that may arise in the classroom, as we read a variety of texts and as we interact with each other in the classroom. Kindergarten isn’t too early to start teaching children to look at multiple perspectives, to imagine alternate possibilities and to develop empathy. If we start there and continue building on throughout the school years imagine what kind of future we might have.

How do you build social imagination & social reasoning in your classroom?

The classroom teacher of the 5th grade class I work in suggested I do the interactive read aloud the other day — my favorite thing! Since this is a Literacy Collaborative school, reading workshop is opened with a ‘readers’ statement,’ (a short statement about something readers do that helps anchor our instruction and focus our students) so I began with “Readers often read deeply and try to ‘see more’ than just the surface storyline.”

Since the start of school we have been talking about inferring, reading between the lines, figuring out the underlying message of a picture book if there is one. The class had read Ish and Crow Boy, along with a few others, and had some great discussions about the message or theme. (By the way, the teacher and I don’t worry much about whether students can define the words ‘infer’ or ‘theme’. We feel it’s more important that they actually DO infer, read deeply, support their opinion about a theme they’ve discovered, comprehend well and so on.)

We’re finding that the students are not familiar with a lot of themes in the literature they read (after all they are only 10 and 11 years old), so we’ve been trying to support them by guiding their thinking as we discuss texts together. They don’t realize as easily as we do that themes can be things like: courage, honesty, standing up for what you believe in, fighting against peer pressure, survival, the power of friendship, believing that everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and so on. The more experiences we give them with interactive read alouds, allowing time to negotiate the deeper meanings of texts together, the greater the chance that they will be able to do this on their own. Basically, it’s just another way of scaffolding their thinking processes.

I wanted to begin with an easy theme to spot, so I told the students that a very popular theme in books is the idea of ‘good vs. evil.’ Some students quickly suggested books like the Harry Potter series and Lightning Thief. From there we talked about Fairy Tales and how the characters in them are often so clearly all good or all bad. As we wondered why ‘good vs. evil’ is such a popular theme and has been around for centuries, I shared with them what I learned from reading the note in the front cover of Rough Face Girl. The note suggests that humans have always craved justice. We like to see good get rewarded and evil punished.

After a fun read aloud (I love doing the voices of the characters in different ways) the students talked with partners about the evidence supporting the theme of ‘good vs evil’ as well as ideas comparing this book to the Cinderella tale. They were interested to learn that there are 1500 versions of Cinderella. Next week I’ll read Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters (another Cinderella tale from Africa) and our conversation will continue.

Here are a few questions for you to ponder: What picture book do you enjoy reading to kids that has some sort of theme or underlying message? How do you support students in learning about themes? What sort of lessons are you doing in primary grades related to ‘reading deeply’? We welcome your comments.

Also, Katie and I talk more about inferring (it’s not just about identifying themes) in Chapter 9 of Catching Readers Before They Fall. We also did a video webcast for the Reading Recovery website. You can view our presentation slides and link to the video webcast here.