Read page 68 of Literacy in Action 4B.

You saw pictures of places to find funny stories: CDs, comic books, books, a play. Can you think of any other places we can find funny stories? Write them in your Reader's Notebook: Read Fictional Stories.

Read page 69 of Literacy in Action 4B to learn about the reading strategy you will work on in this unit.

You already know about the reading strategies of predicting, inferring, and connecting. In this unit, you will practise using the strategies together in a new way. You will predict, infer, and connect to improve your reading.

When You Predict

When you predict, you don't just look at the pictures and the titles on the page. You also use your knowledge about stories and your own life to help you know what might come next. A similar thing happens when you infer. To infer, you ask yourself some questions:

• What did the writer tell me?
• What other information did I figure out by "reading between the lines"?
• What evidence do I have to support my inference?

You do have some evidence in your mind about why you make inferences – otherwise they wouldn't make sense. Now think about combining what you have predicted and what you inferred. How can you connect these ideas with other stories you have read, or things you know from your own life?

Making connections can enhance your understanding and appreciation of a story, especially a funny one. Something may be funny if the unexpected happens in life and in stories rather than what everyone assumes will happen.

For example, in the Ogre story, what you already know about ogres and what you inferred from the poem helped you understand why it is funny. You already know that people are afraid of ogres. In stories about ogres, people will do anything to keep the ogre from getting angry. So when the ogre talked about how nice the people were when they seated him first, you knew (inferred) that it was because they were scared, not polite; and when the other customers did not complain, you knew (inferred) it was because they were scared too, not because they were fascinated.

Connecting your predictions and inferences to your knowledge helped you understand that the funny part was the ogre's misunderstanding of what was going on in the restaurant. You can also use the same process with new words, to crack the code. You did it in the activity in the last lesson – used context to figure out new words. Using the context allowed you to infer what the words meant. Then you combined your inference with what you already know (the rest of the sentence and your own experiences) and could determine the meanings of the words.

The Predict, infer, connect reading strategy will enhance your enjoyment of stories as you work through Unit 5.