Poetry is an excellent activity for teaching people to make inferences because authors fill poetry with clues that give you an impression of the author's original point. Select poetry that has an underlying meaning or larger point. Read a poem aloud and discuss some of the potential meanings based on its contextual clues. Encourage your class to pick out specific evidence from the poem to support their conclusions. Discuss alternate meanings for the clues that they pick and try to construct the overall meaning of the work.
Syllogisms are a form of simple inferences that use two logical premises to arrive at a single, unified solution. You design syllogisms with the idea that if the premises are correct and the logic is correct, then the solution must also be correct. Provide your class with two premises and instruct them to create a solution. As an example, you can combine the two premises "Keeping your desk organized helps you find your materials" and "Having your materials improves your grades" to form the solution "Keeping your desk organized improves your grades." Ask your class to evaluate each premise and discuss whether the premises are correct or flawed.
You can develop your ability to make inferences by reading any prose work and making predictions about the conclusion; however, short stories allow you to do this in a much shorter time. Instruct your class to read part of a short story up to the point where they have the clues they will need to predict the end. Ask them to make predictions about how the story will continue to develop and how the author will resolve the story. Discuss the clues that lead them to make those predictions and encourage them to use this technique with all of their reading assignments.
History lessons offer an ideal opportunity for you to teach your students how to make inferences while teaching them about history. During your lesson, tell your class the situations leading up to a larger event. Include enough clues for your class to make inferences about what will happen. Ask them to make a prediction about how events will occur and about the overall outcome. This lesson teaches your students how to select the important clues from the general information and then how to make specific inferences about the outcome they expect. At the same time, the added attention to the clues, or details, from history helps them understand the conditions surrounding historical events.