Let the inferring begin!

Thursday January 5, 2012 began our RTi lessons on inferring.  My RTi group is a small group of 8 students who scored the lowest on our inferring pretest--most students in my group got 0 - 2 questions correct out of 12 total questions.

I wanted to keep things very visual for this group guessing that visual reminders and cues (colors, pictures, font types, interactive "stuff"...) would not only help them understand what it means to infer, but it would also hopefully keep their attention for the 30 minutes that I had them.

My guess was right :)


YAY!

I am so lucky to be in a school that has a Smartboard in every classroom!  I have become almost dependent on it, in fact.  I use it throughout the day for EVERYTHING!  For RTi I created a simple Smartboard lesson using SMART Notebook with visual reminders that we can look at, discuss, come back to, write on, add to... the possibilities are nearly endless with this technology!

A slide from my Smartboard SMART Notebook lesson

I saw the above equation on pinterest and loved it!  My RTi group totally understood it, too!

A question from the PreTest.  We went over two PreTest questions underlining the clues and crossing out possible answers that definitely did not fit.  I took a picture of the test hard copy and inserted it into my SMART Notebook this way I did not have to transition from using the Smartboard to using the Document Camera, everything was all in one spot ready to go!

We finished up with some practice and interacting with the Smartboard--I wish I could upload this lesson so you could try popping the balloons!  My students just laughed and laughed about it :)  I will definitely be including more balloon-type inferring practice in future lesson!

This first day with inferring went by quickly!  I feel like we started in the perfect spot.  Since we do not have RTi on Fridays and then it's the weekend, I have planned a very similar lesson for Monday's RTi time.  We will quickly move on to inferring the meaning of new or interesting words and inferring character traits next week, too!

Happy Weekend!