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