The other day I tried an activity from Deeper Reading by Kelly Gallagher about making inferences. What I did is post a few sentences, have my students find the ten possible inferences, and then I showed them to them and had them score themselves. I discovered that my 7th graders struggled greatly at being able to do this. Since making inferences is foundational to reading comprehension, I’ve added inferring activities to my daily work with my students. You can see how this works in my Fever, Plagues, and Mosquitoes unit PowerPoint about An American Plague by Jim Murphy. We also read Fever 1793 by Karen Halse Andersen.
You can see the inference activity on slides 6,7,8,11,12,14,15. The other slides have activities for inferring word meaning using context clues. Enjoy!