One day, a dog visiting from the city bounds into the woods. Mo Willems’s City Dog, Country Frog, illustrated by Jon J Muth, is a book I use successfully with students as early as kindergarten. In order to prepare children for learning about inference, I have assembled a text set for the primary grades. That’s why it’s important to lay the groundwork in the early years - before the standards require it and before it becomes a game of catch-up. The standards for grades K–3 focus on main ideas and supporting details, but you can teach main idea until the cows come home and not prepare your young charges to draw inferences and support them with textual evidence. Take, for example, the College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading : “Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.” There is a variation of this standard at every grade level, increasing every year in complexity and difficulty, but it’s not until fourth grade (and then every grade thereafter) that the words drawing inferences and textual evidence become firmly ensconced in the language of the standard.

During this new era of the Common Core State Standards, it is essential for teachers and librarians not only to have an understanding of the end goal of each particular standard but also to have a deep knowledge of the children’s literature that can support it.

City dog country frog