Chapter 5

I'm really glad that this chapter slows down the process of thinking aloud. Beers breaks down which parts of a text are the most vital to focus on. I was particularly suprised (though totally unsure of why I hadn't noticed) that one of the most important clues when making inferences from text lie in the pronouns.
I assumed that the class which struggles with comprehension would have a difficult time with tinferencing. However, I guess I really didn't expect that the class of students who were not struggling readers would gather so much information. Although it probably wasn't the case, they reasoned that the "he" might've even been a son trying to buy his mother the movie tickets. I have to assume that this extensive deduction was the results of superior modeling. So, in this way, Beers reitterates just how very important it is to really  model just exactly how students will have to be doing their work. The onus is on the instructor to model well so that his or her students can perform well.
One awesome idea Beers presents is to cut out cartoons, project them for the class, and help make inferences based on why we find them funny. These are usually political cartoons. Three books of short stories I really want to use in my classroom are Two-Minute Mysteries by Donald Sobol, Five-Minute Mysteries, and Even More Five-Minute Mysteries, both by Ken Weber. Beers proposed that teachers could begin class periods with one of these short stories to get students focused.