To open I want students to remind themselves of what a question looks like. I ask them how do we create them and I ask why. They discuss this and I let them talk and I listen. I then asked students to share with me how they know what sentence is a question and which ones are not. A student brings up that the sentence will start with "Why." This gets the class going and is exactly the direction I wanted the to head in. I then write the "W" words, and word How, onto the white board.
Before we begin forming questions, I ask the class if asking questions can help me understand what I read better. This gets me some mixed answers. One student says, "yes because you would not be teaching about questions if it was a no." Smart Kid. I explain that I am going to show them how asking questions can help me understand what I read. I write 5 large W's down the board and a H at the bottom. It would look like this:
The next step requires the class to help me create good questions to ask.
To help them learn good questioning I am going to do this with a picture book read aloud. I pass out sticky notes to the class, I ask them to each take two and mark them with a Q.
I am going to read aloud and model how I could form a question to help me understand what I read. The question I form will be aligned with what I am reading. I model how it can be a question that I will try to answer as I read through the book.
The book I chose was, Bambino and Mr. Twain by P.I. Maltbie. It is a historical fiction book and it is easy to form good questions. It is also a good book to use for inferencing. When I read aloud, I model a few other strategies we have learned. This shows they can use more than one while reading. Inferencing is the other one I model.
Once we have tried creating a couple together, I write them on the board next to one of the W's.
It is now their turn to try creating questions. They are using the biography on Columbus to practice with. Each student has two sticky notes, they will write a question on one and choose to either visualize, predict, summarize, or form another question on the other.
We begin reading and I will let them know after only a few paragraphs to try forming a question. While students work on their questions I walk around and help when needed or checking in on progress. I am not going to read every questions right now, I am focusing on those students who usually need my help more.
We then read some more and I ask them to choose the format for their second sticky note. They will write on it to end our lesson for today.