Inferring Wrap Up

This week we continued to use both picture and text clues to infer deeper meanings of books we read. The students were fascinated by pictures from the collection "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick". The author Chris Van Allsburg came across the pictures of Harris Burdick through a friend, Peter Wenders. Apparently, Burdick presented the pictures with their titles and captions to Wenders in hopes that Wenders would be interested in purchasing the stories that accompanied the illustrations. Wenders was intrigued by the pictures and asked Burdick to submit the corresponding stories the next day. However, Wenders never heard from Harris Burdick again, so the "true" stories behind the pictures were never revealed. Not only are the circumstances surrounding the pictures quite mysterious, but so are the pictures. Students chose one of the pictures and then made inferences by completing an O-W-I chart (observations, "wonder" questions, and inferences based on the observations and questions).  I hope to finish our last inferencing activity early next week and then move on to a unit on figurative language.