Teaching students to infer meaning from what they've read requires that students use higher order thinking skills. Students usually need lots of practice using what they've read in the story to draw a conclusion. Readquarium has an inference activity that begins by reminding students of what making an inference means and then continues into a practice session. During the session, students read a short passage and then are prompted to make an inference about the story they just read. Students must choose an answer from three choices.
Story elements are narrative elements such as characters, setting and plot. Harcourt School Publishers has an activity that reviews the narrative elements, after which students can read two stories and answer 24 questions about what they've read. Some of the questions are explicit and some implicit. At the end of the activity, students see a score such as 22 out of 24 to show how well they did. Students can give the score to the teacher to track how well students did.
As simple as fact and opinion sounds, being able to distinguish between fact and opinion is a skill that some students may need to practice. Studyzone.org has a lesson that explains what facts and opinions are and explains clues students can use when trying to determine whether a statement is a fact or opinion. After the mini-lesson, students can practice distinguishing between fact and opinion. Students are to think of their answer first and then check to see if their answer is correct.
Beacon Learning Center has an Internet lesson that students can navigate independently. As they read through the story, students learn what cause and effect means and then are prompted to demonstrate their understanding. Once cause has been introduced, students have to match the effect with the correct cause. After effect has been taught, students have to match the cause with the correct effect. Students also have to identify the cause part of a sentence and the effect part of a sentence. An example of this is in the following sample sentence. The dog has allergies so he scratches a lot. The cause part is that the dog has allergies. The effect part is he scratches a lot.