I’m often looking for good lessons to teach inference in speech therapy. So many of the kids I work with have difficulty with abstract language. One girl I work with is 12 years old and I have seen her since she was 3. She has made a lot of progress in the area of being able to make inferences and since she is older we can verbalize it more clearly. I have used many materials in the past such as the HELP products from LinguiSystems and others but my favorite products are great picture books. A good book can generate nice inferential questions on almost every page.

Recently, I have been using everyday experiences to question her on what she could infer from a situation such as:

  • I walked in limping
  • Her brother came in splattered with mud
  • The doorbell rang right after school
  • Mom wasn’t home after school
  • My trip driving back from Wisconsin on the 4th of July weekend took 2 extra hours
  • my neighbor found her flower pot broken in the morning
The last one took some prompting because even my neighbor was stumped but our best answer was that the deer ran into it! My client has enjoyed seeing how many possible answers she can come up with that are feasible.