Drawing Conclusions

Learning to teach your students to draw conclusions doesn’t have to be difficult.

·      Assure your students that they are using this reading strategy every day.

·      Use imaginary situations or pictures to draw conclusions.

·      Point out to your students that they have reasons to support their conclusions.

·      Highlight the importance of having enough support for the conclusions.

Practice

Choose a short story (or a part of a story) that is easy for your students to read and understand. After the first reading, ask students to write down 3 or 4 of the most important facts. Next, tell them to share their thinking about each fact. Put the facts and their thinking together to collectively make conclusions. Finally, write what the students learned and how it can help them in life.

This table will help your students organize their thinking.

Knowledge Interpretation and Application
What do you see/read? Write down the facts.	What do you think about that? Make careful observations and thoughtful interpretations, draw inferences.	What is the author’s message? Draw conclusions.	What did you learn? What does it make you wonder? How can it help you in your life?

Raingsey practiced making conclusions.

Sovantey made interesting conclusions and connections.

More Practice

Teaching students to draw conclusions is essential in helping them understand how to read critically. 

Here are more activities that I selected from various sources. These activities for drawing conclusions will work for children at different grade levels. The more we practice with our students the better they become. Ideally, students should practice making conclusions every day during their reading activities.

- Conclusions from Movies

Students probably use the drawing conclusions strategy most often when they watch movies. Bring in a movie with an enjoyable scene that students can draw conclusions from (most movies will have a scene like this). Let students watch the movie and then work in groups to draw one or more conclusions from what they’ve watched. Encourage them to fill out a graphic organizer about one of their conclusions and emphasize the importance of basing their conclusion on facts from the movie.

- Conclusions from Texts

Choose a text that you’ve already discussed to make this process easier for students the first time. Help them to use the graphic organizers to draw conclusions from the text. When they are successful, encourage them to use the same process to draw conclusions from an unfamiliar text.

- Guess the Emotion

Divide the class into groups and give each group an index card with an emotion written on it. Instruct each group to come up with several “hints" that would describe a person who is feeling that emotion. For example, the group that has the emotion “angry" might list “red-faced" and “fists clenched" as two of the hints.

Then have groups pair up and trade hints to see whether they can draw conclusions about how the person feels based on the given hints. This is a great drawing conclusion activity to teach students how to draw conclusions about characters in texts they are reading.

- You Are What You Bring

Tell the class that you will be describing the contents of someone’s bag, as well as what the bag looks like.

Explain that it will be their job to draw conclusions about the person based on what you say is in the person’s bag. You might describe a tiny pink purse lined with sequins and feathers with a tube of lipstick and a hand mirror, a bulky gym bag with a sweatband and a set of hand weights, or a knapsack filled with library books about Abraham Lincoln.

After you’ve given them several examples, let them break into groups and come up with bags of their own.

Encourage them to trade their descriptions with other groups and see whether the second group draws the same conclusions that the first group had in mind. Then discuss whether any of their conclusions lacked enough support to be probable.

- Pictures

For students who are having trouble drawing conclusions from texts, it can be helpful to give them a different medium with which to practice this skill.

Find some interesting pictures, either online or in some old photo albums, and ask students to draw conclusions based on what is happening in the pictures.

They might draw conclusions about the relationships of the people in the pictures, the emotions that each person in the picture feels, or the setting in which the picture takes place.

Then explain that reading a story is like seeing a snapshot in time, and that drawing conclusions about the picture the author presents us in the story can help us to better understand the story, just like drawing conclusions about the picture helped us better understand what was happening in the picture.

These drawing conclusions activities are the perfect way to engage your students and help them to practice this important reading strategy.

- Using a Graphic Organizer

Draw a graphic organizer on the board consisting of several squares connected with arrows to a larger rectangle. (You may want to place the rectangle above the squares to show that the information in the squares “supports" the conclusion.) Explain to students that in order to draw a conclusion (point to the rectangle), you need to make sure to have plenty of support (point to the squares).  

In Class EAL Support

As our students continue to practice their Daily 5 routines they have to improve various transdisciplinary skills. In Mr.James's classroom this week we talked about social skills and how to be a good reading partner. In Miss Anita's classroom our students are more aware now of the noise level as they know from experience that it is much harder to focus on your reading when people are loud around. The metacognition bookmarks with sentence starters help our students to remain focused on their reading and develop their thinking skills. All the children know that they can spend only a certain amount of time on each routine before the timer goes, and this helps them to improve their self-management skills and be more time-conscious. 

With greater awareness of how they acquire knowledge, students learn to regulate their behavior to make better choices and optimize learning. They begin to see how their strengths and weaknesses affect how they perform. 

Shintaro and Daylin are reading partners.

It is important to reflect on how our students perform during the Daily 5 activities to be able to highlight the successes and mistakes that were made. Such brief discussions guide our students and show them the various ways to independent learning.

Mr. James leads a reflection session after one of the Daily 5 activities.

In Miss Lisa's classroom the students began to construct their understanding of explanation texts. Working in small collaborative groups gave our students an opportunity to share their thinking with more confidence and get support from their peers and/or the teacher.

Meyher was able to find the correct passage and answer the questions. 

During the "I Wonder" session the children were able to continue following their passions and learn more about the chosen topics. In the end of the "I Wonder" time my students had to create a short guided reflection, using sentence starters as a scaffold to structure their written piece.

Using sentence starters made it easier for Yuzuka and Meyher to sum up their learning during the session.

ASSESSMENT

Recently I practiced using the ARTFUL THINKING MATRIX for the formative assessment of my students' reading comprehension skills as well as critical thinking skills. 

Reasoning is a thinking disposition that we continue to develop in Grade 3. Using routines like "WHAT MAKES YOU SAY THAT?" gives my students an opportunity to describe what they see, think or know and begin to provide some textual or graphic evidence.

Questioning and investigating is another thinking disposition that propels the process of inquiry. Routines like "I Noticed, I WONDER", "CREATIVE QUESTIONS" and "SEE, THINK, WONDER" support my students in developing good questions and making connections to their prior knowledge. My students began to interpret, determine the importance of events as well as distinguish between observations and interpretations.

The above mentioned routines trigger a discussion with students, during which I can see the growth and improvement of my students' thinking skills. It also is a good indication of which students are behind and what kind of support is needed. 

Analyzing the outcomes of the VTRs drives my planning and guides me in my attempts to meet the learning needs of my students the best way.