Mentor Monday 3/3/14: Making Predictions

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Hi everyone! This is going to be a VERY exciting week for me and my family. Tomorrow is our baby #3 delivery day 3/4/14, so please keep us in your prayers. You may be wondering if Mentor Monday will be taking a break. I’m happy to report that I have several wonderful teacher blogger friends that will take over the month of March for me and guest blog. So, yes! You can count on Mentor Monday to continue while I’m adjusting to three little ones, all under the age of 2. (yikes!)

One more thing before I continue onto my post. My latest March/April newsletter is up and ready to download. Just click the owl in the right sidebar saying, “Click here to see my newsletters!” and it will take you to Issue #5. A special thank you to Em of Curious Firsties for her guest article on the NIM strategy. You may have read about it on the Adventures In Literacy Land blog. It’s an important fluency strategy for struggling readers, so be sure to check it out.

~Making Predictions~
I thought this was an appropriate topic this week since many of my friends and family are making predictions on what the gender, and weight of the baby will be. Those predictions are based on their own background, their relationship with me, my size (!), and a few old wives’ tales mixed in to make things more interesting.
When we ask our budding readers to make and/or confirm predictions before, during and even after reading a book, it’s important to model how to make an informed prediction, based on several things. I often say to my students that prediction is inference’s cousin. With predictions, we can mostly rely on the text to answer the whether our predictions may be confirmed or not. An inference may not be as explicit. Check out this slideshare for more on distinguishing between the two strategies. When we predict or make an educated guess, we use…
  • Our background knowledge
  • The pictures
  • The title
  • New vocabulary
  • Events in the plot along the way.
~My Mentor Text~
The book I have chosen this week to highlight this reading strategy is The Wednesday Surprise by Eve Bunting. This is a great book to use in September when you’re establishing your Reader’s Workshop routines and drumming up excitement for reading.  I can’t think of a more perfect book for modeling this strategy. When you think surprise, you automatically predict! Anna and her Grandma are working on a special surprise for Dad’s birthday every Wednesday night until he comes home from his job as a truck driver. I won’t give away what the surprise is if you haven’t read it yet, but it is so precious.
My thirds read this every year as the first book we did in our Eve Bunting author study. We made a chart that asked them to predict what the surprise might be at key points in the plot. Eve really keeps the reader wondering even up until the very end. After filling in the chart with our predictions, we would go back and see how close we were to confirming them. Prediction making while reading, of course, aren’t setting out to see who’s right and who’s wrong.

Be sure to check out this fabulous mentor text with your students. Feel free to comment with your own book choices for making predictions, along with any you may have for gender and weight too! :))
I will be back blogging hopefully by early April. Please welcome my guests throughout the month of March. Thank you!

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5 Comments

  1. The Wednesday Surprise is a great choice for making predictions! I'm looking forward to guest-hosting Mentor Monday next week! Best wishes for a smooth delivery and speedy recovery…I'll be thinking of you tomorrow. I'm thinking PINK too!

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