Understand How to Make Inferences

When we are reading, the text doesn't always tell us everything exactly, but gives us clues to be able to help us to work out what is happening or how a character might be feeling.

When we use these clues to help us, we are using our inference skills. 

Let's read the sentence below and work out how the character might be feeling:

Emily had a big smile on her face and was jumping for joy.

Although the text doesn't say the word 'happy', the clues about her smiling and jumping are enough to help us to work out that she is feeling happy. 

Let's have a go at working out how characters might be feeling using our inference skills in these next questions to search for clues.