I'm sure many of you have read The Wednesday Surprise by Eve Bunting, but I'd love to share how I used this story with my students a couple weeks ago.
They work on the surprise while grandma babysits on Wednesday nights.
I won't ruin it for you if you've never read it, but for obvious reason it's a GREAT book to use for questioning as it elicits many curious questions, the most obvious being: what is the surprise!?
Reading Level:
DRA 18
Guided Reading K
Lexile 540L
I used this book for a questioning lesson. I had previously introduced and modeled asking questions during a think aloud mini lesson where I read a few pages from another book, asking questions as I went. I also created an anchor chart to help support students in answer questions during reading.
When I read this story, I stopped to model twice in the early pages of the story, asking questions during my think aloud. I think stopped at previously selected places in the book and asked students to turn and talk to a partner (teach, okay in my WBT room) then, stop and jot their question on a sticky note. We did this 3 times throughout the story. At the end of the book, I asked kiddos to choose their best question and stick it to our questioning anchor chart we had made during a previous lesson.
We then went back the next day to see if we could answer our questions. We sorted our questions by "Right There" Answers, "Inference"/"Book & Brain" Answers and "Unanswerable" I have since made a nicer chart for students to sort their stickies onto (which I keep neglecting to take a picture of), and this photo is from a sort for a different book, but you get the idea...
I also made sure with each lesson on questioning to encourage students to ask questions while they participate in Read to Self. I gave each student stickies to do so during the following days. After 2 Read to Self sessions, and an individual conference with most students, I collected their "best 2" Read to Self question and sorted them out for my self to see if kiddos weren't asking questions, were asking thin questions or were asking thick questions. I had about half and half as far as thick/thin go as well as many students who were asking a combination of both. I simply stuck the sticky notes to a tri-folded piece of construction paper for my own visual of where my class was. Again, like the above chart, not so pretty, but effective for my purposes!
I hope these simple to implement ideas might help you to teach questioning or that I have introduced you to a great read aloud :)
thanks! :)
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