Predicting What Will Happen in a Story

A reader should look for clues to make predictions about what will happen next in a story. It’s important for a reader to make predictions, because it helps them analyze what they are reading and better understand everything they are reading. So there’s two ways for a reader to make predictions about what they’re reading.

The first way we already identified, and that’s through clues in the story. Many times the author includes clues in the story to help the reader figure out what’s going to happen next. The second way to make predictions is through personal experience. Say, for example, that a character stays in the sun all day.

Well, from personal experience you know that if you stay in the sun all day you get sunburned. Through personal experience, you can make a prediction that the character is going to get sunburned. Now, suppose there is a story about a boy going swimming and he swims too far out. Suppose the story says that the boy can’t get back to shore, so he starts to yell.

Then, the lifeguard comes out and helps him. But the story stops after the boy goes back in the water again. Well, even though the story doesn’t continue, as a reader you might be able to predict that the boy won’t swim out as far this time because he almost drowned when he swam out that far last time.

Now, this prediction may not be true, but it is the most likely thing to happen. Let’s read this story right here and analyze it. When Glen is sick, his mother keeps him home from school. He stays in bed all day and takes medicine. Glenn woke up this morning with a sore throat. His head was hot and he felt achy. What usually happens when Glenn is sick?

His mother keeps him home from school. Well, Glenn woke up this morning with a sore throat and his head was hot and he felt achy. We can conclude then that he’s sick, because when you’re sick you know that a lot of times you have a sore throat. You feel hot and your body kind of aches.

From this, we can predict that his mother is going to keep him home from school and he is going to have to stay in bed all day and take medicine. Now, we don’t actually know what happens next, because the story stops right here. But from clues in the story, we can predict what will happen next.

Now, there are some other ways to make predictions. You can also use text features to help locate information to make predictions and verify conclusions determined about different text. You could use keywords as clues. You can look for keywords here like “sick” or “home”, “school”, things like that to make these predictions.

You can also look for bold print words. If any words are in bold (there is none here but in other stories there may be words and bold), underlined words, or words in italics, make sure that you pay attention to those words. That will help you make predictions about a text.