Inference Jones Beginning

Inference Jones Beginning
From The Critical Thinking Co.

About the product

Inference Jones provides short, fun, and easy-to-use activities that improve critical reading and higher order thinking by developing the student’s ability to draw inferences from written text. Research shows inferential reasoning is a prerequisite component to superior reading comprehension. The National Foundation for Educational Research concluded that "the ability to draw inferences predetermines reading skills: that is, poor inferential reasoning causes poor comprehension and not vice versa."

We all make inferences in our daily lives (e.g. we naturally think a child is happy because we see them laughing). But how does this ability apply to written communication? When we read a written passage, we’re actually reading a representation of the author’s thoughts and ideas, because the written word does not convey a meaning in and of itself. Readers must construct the meaning through interpretation.

The reader’s interpretation is the result of inferential analysis which includes drawing from personal knowledge and experiences, social values, and cultural conventions. The interpretation connects a meaning to the words, providing the reader with an understanding of the character’s actions, circumstances, or events in the story.

Inference Jones: Beginning has a readability level appropriate for grades 3-4 but can also be used as a remedial resource for older students (grades 5-12+).

Our Thoughts

This interesting workbook will help you student to improve the critical reading and comprehension of small texts that he/she will have to read as well as questions to answer.

When my son, who is in grade 5, saw that the book was intended for grades 3 and 4 he wasn’t extremely motivated in doing the exercises.  He thought it would be too easy for him to do.   But to be honest, after seeing the small errors he has made in the exercises I asked him to do, I think it would be a great thing for him to go through the entire book so that he can develop a better critical reading and have a better facility to answer the questions asked.   Generally speaking he did pretty good but he assumed that some of the information in the texts he read were evident when answering the questions.   

Inference Jones Beginning contains nineteen exercises for the student to read and answer based on their comprehension of the text.   It also explains how each exercises should be done by including a sample activity at the beginning of the book.  Also, you will find the answer key at the end of it.  Each activity would take about 10 to 20 minutes depending on the skills of your student. This product is definitively a fun tool to help your student to learn to think careful before answering questions about a text he/she has read.    With practice, I suspect that my son will get better in taking the time to not interpret what he has read when answering the questions.   Some questions are tricky I must admit but when the text doesn’t give you details on something you have to be careful about how you answer.

What I really like from the products at The Critical Thinking Co is that I can reproduce the pages so I can have my kids work on it when they reach the age for it.    The Inference Jones is another wonderful reproducible product.   With four kids in our house, we definitively prefer the reproducible products.

The regular price is 11.99$.   However, it is currently on sale for 10.79$ on The Critical Thinking Co website.

An Inference Jones product for grade 5 and 6 will be available in June 2012 as well.

Disclaimer: Thanks to The Critical Thinking Co. for sending me the above mentioned product for review purposes. I was not monetarily compensated for this review. Please note that the review was not influenced by the Sponsor in any way. All opinions expressed here are only my own.