Stickman Inference

An inference activity

Separate what the text tells you about a character from what you worked out yourself. Children routinely present an inference as a fact, and this makes the line between them visible.

Told, inferred, predicted. Three different claims, and children mix them up constantly.

It catches the confident guesser. “It says so in the book” has to survive being checked.

Prints a blank figure. Ready to label by hand.

Label it on the whiteboard · printing the sheet is free

The sheet it prints

The printable stickman inference sheet — a blank figure to label with what you know, infer and predict.

How do you teach inference?

Make children separate what the text actually says from what they have worked out themselves, because they routinely present the second as if it were the first. This activity labels a figure of a character in three colours of claim — what the text says, what has been inferred, and what is being predicted — so the whole class can see which kind of thinking each label is.

Why separate what you know from what you inferred?

Because children present all three as facts. He is mean and he has a sister arrive in the same tone of voice, and until they are separated a child cannot tell you which one they could defend. Colour-coding makes the difference visible instead of abstract.

What is the difference between inferring and predicting?

Inferring is working out something that is true now but unstated — he is nervous, they are poor. Predicting is a claim about what happens next. Children mix them constantly, and the sheet keeps them in separate colours so the mixing is visible the moment it happens.

How do you stop “it says so in the book”?

Ask for the line. Not the page — the line. A claim in the known colour has to be quotable, and one round of checking teaches a class more about evidence than a term of telling them to use it. Anything that cannot be quoted moves colour, which is the lesson.

How do you make it harder or easier?

To start, give six labels already written and ask only for the colour. Then let them write their own. To stretch them, require that every inference is tied to a specific line, and revisit the same character three chapters later to see which predictions survived.

From the classroom

The good moment is always an argument about a colour. Somebody writes he is poor as a known fact, somebody else says nowhere does it say that, and the class has to go back to the text — which is the whole skill, happening on its own. Let that argument run rather than settling it. And keep the sheet: coming back to it after another few chapters, and moving a prediction into the known column, shows children that reading is something you update rather than something you finish.

Try it now

Take a character introduced in the last chapter you read and fill the known column only. It is usually shorter than a class expects, which is the point.