Teaching Questioning as a Comprehension Strategy

Teaching the questioning strategy for comprehension is always a tricky one. This year, I came up with a little game to motivate my students to use this strategy.

First, I introduced the strategy with this anchor chart (minus the sticky notes):

(that's supposed to be a track on the question mark...)

I modeled the strategy with "think alouds" as I read a story. After modeling the types of questions you could ask while reading (and how this helped my comprehension), I introduced the game. I called it Guess my Question. This got my more competitive kids paying attention! I read a book aloud, then stopped at certain places and said, "Guess my question." I would call on kids until they came up with a question that would make sense for that part in the story. This game got kids to really think about potential questions to ask while reading.

I made this for my students to record questions they had while reading.

click on the picture to download (3 choices of borders included by fancydogstudios 3am teacher and kpm doodles)

I chose the speech bubbles because they matched my sticky notes on my anchor chart.

You could use this as an independent activity for students, or you could use a more guided approach by using this with another read aloud. You could stop at places in the story, and have students write a possible question for that part (similar to the game, "Guess my Question"). This could also be used as an assessment to see how well your students are grasping this strategy.

I used this with my guided reading groups today. We read a book from readinga-z called The Cinnamon Bun Mystery. I stopped them occasionally and we brainstormed possible questions we may have. I encouraged them to find the answers to the questions we asked by reading on. For example, there is a place in the story where the main character gets to the bakery and a lady had just bought all of the cinnamon buns. Possible questions we came up with were: why would she buy all of them? who bought all of them? I wonder if she's going to eat all of them herself? After reading on, we found the answer to all of those questions. I reminded students that by questioning we kept our comprehension on track!