Daily missions. Brighter futures.
Clue + thinking = inference. Children who can't do it usually just haven't been told they're allowed to.
Inference is one of those words that makes parents assume they can't help. It has a very simple meaning:
the writer gives you clues, and you work something out from them. Your child does this constantly — with your face, with the tone of a room, with whether the biscuit tin has been moved. They've just never been told it counts.
Show them they already do it
Tom slammed the door and threw his bag on the floor.Ask how Tom is feeling. Angry, or upset — every child gets this.
Now point out the trick: the sentence never says Tom was angry. They worked it out from the clues. That is inference, and they just did it without effort.
Make them a detective
The rule for the rest of the evening: “you can't just tell me the answer — show me the clue.”
Now inference has a shape they can repeat:
CLUE + THINKING = INFERENCEAsk what the weather's like. Cold. Then the important half:
“What made you think that?”The answer to that second question is what an exam gives marks for. The first answer on its own usually gets none.
The mistake children often make
They offer a perfectly sensible idea that has drifted away from the text — often something true about the world rather than something the passage supports.
Keep returning to the same four words: “where's your clue?”
It isn't a trick question and it shouldn't sound like one. You're teaching them that an idea and the evidence for it are two separate things that have to travel together.
“The classroom fell silent as the headteacher walked in.”
What can you infer about how the pupils feel about the headteacher? Then: “what in the sentence made you think that?”
There's more than one defensible answer here — respect, fear, or simply that they'd been told off before. Any of them is fine if it's anchored to “fell silent”. That is the skill: not guessing what the examiner wants, but reasoning from what's on the page.
Inference in the Learning Centre
Practice texts and questions that build the clue-then-reasoning habit, which is where most comprehension marks live from Year 6 onwards.
Open the Inference lessons →Where MindBlaze fits
The aim was never to teach children to guess well. It's to teach them to combine evidence with reasoning and say both out loud.
That habit shows up in English, history, science and every job interview they'll ever have — and MindBlaze practises it in the verbal reasoning missions as well as in comprehension.
Where's your clue?