Asking Questions

As I've posted before, I love finding new teaching videos.  I recently found this one about asking questions before, during, and after reading and decided to try it in my class.

I made a few adaptations to the lesson to make it work a little better for my first grade kiddos.  I used the book Milo and the Fire Engine Parade (although Supermotamus looks like a fun book!) and I started the lesson by modeling how I would look at the book and generate "Before Reading" questions.  Then I gave each kid two post-its.  One said "During reading, I wonder..." and the other said, "After reading, I wonder..." As I read the story, I paused and gave the kiddos a chance to write down their questions.  At the end of the story, I went through the same process as the teacher in the video and we considered whether or not our questions had been answered.  I really liked this aspect of the lesson because I think it was an important point to make -- while we look for answers in the story, sometimes we don't find the answers and that's okay if the question wasn't essential to our understanding.

Then, I took the practice a step further by asking the kids to do the same process in their Independent Reading.  I gave them a sheet with three boxes to practice asking questions before, during, and after reading a "Just-Right" (Independent Level) book.  This was a good check to see if the kiddos really got the idea.  Asking questions about their own reading is an important Common Core Literacy Standard so it's something I will revisit frequently this year, but this was a great start!  Plus it went right along with our newest Comprehension Helper: Questioning Owl.   

I'm so glad I found a video to inspire yet another lesson.  As it happend, the day I was taught this lesson, I was being filmed as well.  A few months ago I volunteered to participate in a program with my school district to gather footage that will be used as part of a training for new teachers in the district. I'm pleased to say that the folks from the district were very impressed with my kiddos! :)