Master the Art of Making Smart Predictions While Reading

A prediction is when you use your thinking to guess what comes next. You make predictions every day! When you see dark clouds, you might predict it will rain. When you smell cookies baking, you might predict someone is making treats.

Good readers make predictions while they read stories. You can look at picture clues and use what you already know to guess what will happen next in the story.

Background knowledge is all the stuff you already know from your own life. This knowledge helps you understand what you read better. When you see a rocket on a book cover, your background knowledge tells you the story might be about space adventures.

You can connect your personal experiences to new stories you read. If you have been to the zoo, you can use that experience to understand stories about animals better. This connection between what you know and what you read is called using prior knowledge to make connections.

Stories give you many clues to help you make predictions. Picture clues are details in drawings that give you hints about what might happen. When you see a character putting on a winter coat, you can predict they will go outside in cold weather.

You can also find clues in the words the author uses. These clues help you understand the story better and make good guesses about what comes next. Learning to use context for word recognition helps you find these important clues.

Prediction: A smart guess about what will happen next using clues and what you already know.

Background Knowledge: All the things you already know from your own life that help you understand new stories and situations.

Clues: Little hints that authors give you in words and pictures to help you understand the story.

Picture Clues: Details in drawings and pictures that give you hints about what might happen in the story.

Story Patterns: The way stories follow the same order that helps you predict what comes next.

Wonder Questions: Curious thoughts that make you think ahead about what might happen in the story.

You can practice making predictions by looking at book covers and guessing what the stories will be about. When you see pictures of animals, castles, or rockets, use your background knowledge to predict the story topic.

Try making predictions about real-life situations too. When you see someone packing a lunch or putting on special clothes, use clues to guess what they might do next. This practice helps you become better at predicting and using prior knowledge.

Before you start making background knowledge predictions, you should know how to ask questions for a variety of purposes. You should also practice asking questions about text details to help you find important clues in stories.

Making background knowledge predictions connects to many other reading skills. You will use this skill when making connections between text and experience and when making inferences using stated information.

This topic also helps you with clarifying word meanings through questions and finding word meanings through context. As you get better at making predictions, you will be ready to learn about making predictions using evidence and making inferences using text evidence.