Improve yr 6 inference

[MrPickles73]

DD is a good reader (reading age of 13) but apparently her inference skills are lacking. I am no English scholar so can someone explain to me what we can do at home to help her please? Thankyou.

Inference is drawing an indirect conclusion from information, using reasoning. For example, 'The girl took her jumper off.' Depending on the surrounding text, the girl could be hot, or she could have spilled something on her jumper.

I used to play “show don’t tell” with my dd on the walk home from school. It was fun. I would give her a bald sentence: “Fred was angry” and she had to show me that he was without saying it. So she might say:
“Fred stormed out of the room and slammed the door. His scowl deepened.”
This helps inference from the other direction. We really used to enjoy it and she would come up with more and more elaborate sentences and we’d chat back and forth all the way home.

Whilst she is reading a book (or it can be when watching a TV programme or film) stop and discuss, based on what's happened so far, what she thinks might happen next in the story and why. Or why a character did a particular thing, would she have done the same and if it, why not.

It always helps if you can join in as well and make it as much fun as possible.

That's really helpful, thankyou everyone. Much appreciated.

This book has 4 texts with inference questions.

CPG, KS2 English, SAT Buster stretch, Fiction

I’m sure you can find worksheets online too.

Do consider that primary inference seems more cut and dried than secondary. Dd was always a child who thought differently. If you said to her 'The children are putting the Christmas decorations up, what time of year is it?' She would say that you couldn't tell. To her although it is probably winter it might also be that they were putting the decorations up in the loft (I.e. January or in fact any time of year because they might have moved house), they were putting them up in the summer because they lived in Australia, they were putting them up because they just loved Christmas and felt like celebrating in the spring, they were helping in a shop in August and they were doing a Christmas display, they had just come out of lockdown and decided to have a delayed Christmas. She would always go for the 'it is not possible to tell option' in multiple choice questions because there were too many alternative possibilities. At secondary she is praised for exactly these observations because 'she always be relied on to make us all see alternative interpretations.' She can always justify her answers and has a way of seeing differently which the English teachers seem to love especially as the texts become more complex.

Should have said she had extra support in yr6 for inference because she wouldn't accept that there was just one correct answer to comprehension questions. It didn't seem to help, just made the TA more frazzled and had no impact on how she answered questions.

We ended up just telling her not to give the answer she thought was right but give the answer that Mrs TA would think was right. That helped a bit.