Inferencing with Fascinating Photo Prompts - Graphic Organizers

Tired of boring, generic photo prompts? Read on!

Help your students to develop critical thinking and writing skills by:

• Finding context clues
• Using prior knowledge
• Giving evidence and reasons
• Explaining thinking
• Connecting to learned concepts or ideas
• Sharing and revising their opinion

All in a simple and engaging weekly routine! This resource is excellent for a wide-range of ages and language levels.

So Many Ways to Use It

- modeled teacher think alouds

- great weekly thinking and writing routine to explain thinking with reasons

- before-the-bell activity

- excellent for conversation (individual > partner share > group share)

- fantastic for EAL / ELL to build vocabulary and generate excited conversation

- engaging literacy center with many different photos students can choose from

- choose photos that connect to current classroom units and topics to engage students in discussion or keep it broad

What does this resource include?

This resource includes a variety of graphic organizers and sentence starters which compliment "The Learning Network - Teaching and Learning with the New York Times" weekly segment that features a fascinating real-life photo without a caption. Students must use their prior knowledge to inference and find meaning in the photo and try to explain 'what is happening'? The following week the caption is posted to the website. You will need internet access to see or print photos. This resource includes graphic organizers and sentence starters to compliment this activity, but not the photos themselves. (If you're looking for an inferencing resource with photos included, please check out more other resource with includes 84 real photo cards here

The Graphic Organizers

focus on:

1. what's happening in this photo? (describing)

2. what do you see that made you think this? (explaining context clues)

3. what more can you find?

- 7 different formats ranging from simple to more complex

- more complex organizers go beyond the three questions above to deepen thinking

- 1 set of sentence starters

- several blank organizers for flexible use

- generic and can be used with any of the photographs

Check out these strange & amazing photos online!

Weekly NYT Photos here

https://www.nytimes.com/column/learning-whats-going-on-in-this-picture

(& scroll down to see hundreds of photos since 2012!)

Top 40 NYT Photos here slideshow here: https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2016/08/16/learning/images-from-four-years-of-whats-going-on-in-this-picture.html

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Check out my inferencing with real photos task cards here: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Inferencing-Task-Cards-Inference-with-84-Captivating-Real-Photos-