Grade: 4th

This is a great book to introduce making inferences with. Throughout the story, the class believes that their teacher is missing. They are stuck with an evil substitute teacher named Viola Swamp. What they do not seem to know if that Miss Nelson is not missing. She is actually Ms. Swamp. At the end of the story, my class will fill out a chart. One side of the chart will say, "The text says.." and the other will say, "I can infer that..." Students will then go into the text and find parts of the text that they can infer something about. For example, they could put, "Back at home, Miss Nelson hung her coat next to an ugly black dress." They can infer that that ugly black dress was Ms. Swamp's. Therefore, they could write in the inference box, "I can infer that Miss Nelson was Viola Swamp."