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True student engagement means students are curious, interested and motivated to learn. Teachers struggle with presenting material in the lesson cycle component of the anticipatory set, that is relevant to students and that does not take a huge amount of  time, effort, and materials to create.  Teachers need assistance in utilizing tools that are ready to use to engage students.

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Teachers can integrate all subjects through reading skills.  The inference collection is a free website that hosts a collection of photos that teachers can utilize to connect prior learning during their lesson hooks by covering up the photo and revealing one section at a time as an introduction to a lesson.  Students are captivated through the mystery of identifying the picture and making connections to its relevance and the content of their lesson.

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Once Upon a Picture - Images to Inspire - Teaching Resources

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Inference is a tricky area of reading. Children don't always understand what it means to infer, and stumble on test questions demanding this of them. I've found that teaching the skill explicitly using a non-threatening stimulus has worked brilliantly. First, you develop the understanding of the skill, what is involved and what is required to answer questions. Then this is practised, and practised some more (justifying inferences, anyone?), before being applied to text. The joy lies in the depth of responses offered by all children taking part.

Here are some of my favourites for developing inference in the primary classroom. Let me know if you try any!

Click on the image to see the original post.
You can read more about the approach here, and ask me on Facebook or Twitter.

Note: Some of the questions below will include other skills, including prediction.

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The Inference Collection - Once Upon a Picture

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Inference is a tricky area of reading. Children don't always understand what it means to infer, and stumble on test questions demanding this of them. I've found that teaching the skill explicitly using a non-threatening stimulus has worked brilliantly. First, you develop the understanding of the skill, what is involved and what is required to answer questions.

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The teacher poses an excellent, high-level, thought provoking question during the lesson cycle component of instructional delivery: the mini lesson, with only one student responding.  Or, the teacher has each student respond to the question on a sticky note, then is left with a plethora of individual responses to sort through. There is a constant struggle with finding ways to include all students responding at the same time while collecting evidence of their responses.

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Google Forms is an on-line resource where teachers can input their pre-planned student questions, pull them up on their smart boards during the mini lesson while, students answer on their device, independently or with a partner.  The responses can be saved in Forms or saved directly to a spreadsheet.

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Want to get more out of Google apps at work or school?

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In order to differentiate instruction for students in the lesson cycle components of independent practice, teachers need to know students' strengths and weaknesses.  Class structure can make this a very difficult task.  If a classroom is departmentalized, then the teacher has more students to know, and less time to do so.  If a class is self-contained then the teacher has more content areas to cover.  A tool is needed that can frequently assess students to assist the teacher in grouping based off of individual needs.

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Istation Reading & Math is an online computer program with purposeful reading & math assessments and instruction.  Its computer-adaptive diagnostic assessments measure overall proficiency and mathematical ability presented to the student in fun, engaging, game-like experiences.  Students are automatically given monthly assessments that will give teachers current reading and mathematics data to aide them when forming flexible groups.  Data reports are easy to access. Teachers are then able to create heterogeneous groups of students for workstations and homogeneous groups of students for small group instruction.

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Istation | PK-8 Educational Software - Reading, Math & Spanish

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Istation is an award-winning, comprehensive e-learning program for Reading, Math and Spanish Literacy used by millions of students around the world.