About this activity
Ten scenes described in a line each, with the event left out: a spilled cup and a wet book on the desk; muddy paw prints across a clean kitchen floor; an empty birdcage with the door open; suitcases by the front door and a taxi outside; a classroom with chairs on the desks and the lights off. The evidence is visual and concrete, which makes this a good place to start inference work.
How to use it in a session
Ask which detail gave it away. The muddy paw prints scene has two pieces of evidence — the prints and the clean floor — and the second is what makes it a story rather than a fact. Sort the ten by what is being inferred: past event, future event, place, or time. The classroom scene asks for time of day, which is a different kind of inference and worth naming.
What to listen for
Watch for answers that use one clue and ignore the other. A student who says someone has a dog, for the paw prints, has identified the cause and missed that the floor was clean, which is the part that makes it interesting. Notice the half-melted snowman, which requires reasoning about time passing rather than a single event.
Carrying it home
Rooms are full of evidence. Asking what happened here, in a kitchen after cooking or a garden after rain, is a real inference question and costs nothing.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- Second through fifth, alongside single-clue story inference.
- Do I need to sign up?
- No, all ten scenes play free in the browser.
- Are picture inferences easier than text ones?
- Usually, because the evidence is concrete and present all at once. That makes this a good starting point before moving to passages where the clues are spread across sentences.