Evidence and Drawing Conclusions: Spacehopper.io to scaffold inferences

I'm always trying to think of a fresh way to introduce the process of drawing inferences. Paramount, inferences are made after evidence is collected. Because there is little text, students don't get bogged down in comprehension and decoding; therefore, Spacehopper.io is a great way to scaffold reading skills.

What is it?

When you go to the website there is a 360 picture of somewhere in the world, a world map with all the possible locations, and a place where you can check answers and get clues.  You can even select certain continents if you want to bring in social studies curriculum. You only get three guesses!

I found that while I can navigate on an iPhone the screen is much too small, so it makes the most sense to do this on devices larger than a phone or whole class.

1. Navigate to spacehopper.io. Refresh the image if you think it too vague. I think an image where there is a little bit of writing on a sign is helpful because that will help establish language. 

2. Explain how the website works and that as a class you will determine the location together. 

3. Scribe or have students scribe all the details that you notice in the image. If using a graphic organizer like the A+ strategy, use that on the board. Mentally, keep track of any students who draw on previous knowledge/experiences. You will be able to reference this later on the importance of building background and knowing a lot about the world to become a better reader.

4. After the class has agreed on a map location and been through the inferencing, repeat with a couple different scenes. You want to have students experience hard ones and difficult ones and get an idea of what it is like to refine ideas. 

5. When done, have students write a short reflection answering the questions: "What did we do to be successful? What did we do when we were not? What were the steps we took to draw conclusions?"

6. As students discuss in groups to refine the "steps", mill about the room looking for academic vocabulary.

7. As a class facilitate creating the steps. Make sure to point out any academic vocabulary you heard from students as well as reference when students used their prior knowledge. 

8. Ask students if they know what it is called when we use our prior knowledge and evidence to draw conclusions. If "infer" is not suggested, introduce the concept. Explain that we do this as well as readers.

9. Reenter a previously read text and ask an inference questions. Reinforce that the first thing we do isn't answer the questions and then look for evidence, but rather just like in spacehopper.io, we look at the evidence first.