Becoming Detectives to Better Understand Our World Through Inference

When 5-year-old Ryan had trouble “reading the room,” taking on a pretend-play role as part of the Scooby-Doo mystery team helped him think like a detective and look for clues to figure out what was happening in his environment. Not everything is explicitly stated in life, books or conversations, so children need to learn to infer or “fill in the blanks” to understand our world. Inferencing is a sophisticated cognitive skill that helps us understand life’s intricacies. Try these steps to teach students or clients this important skill: Tune in to the environment. “What Does Not Belong?” activities help children take notice of their surroundings and find things out of place, and allows them to work on flexible interpretations of events. For example, when told his next session would take place in the school lounge, Ryan asked if he’d play, “Guess Who?” because three weeks prior, he played “Guess Who?” at this location. In this scenario, we could work on using prior knowledge to interpret events. Understand and discuss object function. Accurately labeling objects doesn’t indicate comprehension of the objects’ function. In the lounge, Ryan noticed the air conditioner was making noise. He also noted the room was cold. He tuned into the environment and effectively labeled the object, but he didn’t link his observation of the air conditioner to the room’s temperature. Here, we worked on requesting more information to make an appropriate assumption. Reg...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Tags: Private Practice Schools Slider Speech-Language Pathology Autism Spectrum Disorder Language Disorders Source Type: blogs