The Koala Who Could - A Virtual ELA Lesson

This week’s lesson is all about making inferences and I’m reading aloud the story, The Koala Who Could by Rachel Bright to practice our inferring skills.

You can watch the full video lesson HERE:

Posted by Get Your Teach On on Friday, May 1, 2020

I’m using this printable to talk more about inferences and what readers do when they infer as they’re reading text.

To illustrate the concept of making inferences prior to reading the text, I created an “Inferencegram” printable to tell a story. Basically I explain that my mom has given me the task of buying a gift for her friend, but I know NOTHING about her and have no idea what kind of gift she might like. So, I need to INFER what gifts might be good based on the pictures and clues in her INFERENCEGRAM. What do the pictures say about her? What does her bio and handle tell me? What can I infer that she likes? How will this these inferences help me pick out the perfect gift for my mom’s friend?

The Koala Who Could is an excellent mentor text for discussing the concept of THEME as well. We’ll touch on that prior to reading the story, too. Encourage readers to listen for the central message. What lesson did the main character learn? How can we apply that to our lives as well? We’ll circle back to this after reading the book.

As with any book, there are many different things that can be inferred from the story. After reading this one, I’ll prompt the kids to infer where the story takes place. While the book never specifically states that the setting is in Australia, I can infer based on the MANY context clues and illustrations that it does. We can also infer what we think Kevin (the main character) would have done if he wasn’t forced out of the tree. Would he have come down on his own? What do we know about his character that helps us to make this inference? Those are just a couple of directions we can go with that. Here’s a printable students can use to record their schema, context clues, and inference.

You can also incorporate these FREE digital slides into learning as well. These are great for giving your students an opportunity to practice their inferring skills. Just click on either the GOOGLE FREEBIE or SEESAW FREEBIE to grab your set. You can find the full version of these activities HERE.

To piggyback off of the inference that this story takes place in Australia, this would be a great opportunity to bring in some non-fiction learning and explore different Australian animals. Here’s a great video that introduces kids to different Australian animals (kid appropriate)…many which appear in the story!

Now circling back to the theme of the story that we talked about earlier. The Koala Who Could is all about a koala who doesn’t want to come down from his tree because it’s where he feels most comfortable and everything “down there” just seems too scary and risky. However, he’s eventually forced out of the tree when it comes crashing down to the ground and guess what?! He realizes it’s not so bad after all! How many things do you want to try, but you’re scared of the risk? This is a great story for touching on what it means to have a growth mindset and encourage kids to try something outside of their comfort zones. SO, we’ll do this directed drawing of a koala, cut it out, and then glue it on a sheet where we’ll write down things we want to try, but are too scared. Almost like a checklist of sorts for trying new things/goal setting.