Teaching students to draw conclusions is essential in helping them understand how to read critically. These drawing conclusions activities will work for children at almost any grade level.
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.
This post is part of the series: Reading Strategy Lesson Plans: Making Inferences and Drawing Conclusions
Wondering how to teach your students about making inferences and drawing conclusions? The strategies are related but different, and they can be taught in similar ways. This series of articles explains how to teach the strategies and includes activities that can help your students learn them.
