Questioning: The Strategy The
Propels Readers Forward
According to Harvey and Goydvis
questions are the master key to understanding. By asking questions readers can
clarify their confusions, stimulate research efforts, and take us into deeper
reading. I know as a teacher and avid reader I am always asking myself
questions and modeling this for my kindergartners. Some of my students have
caught on to this strategy and will ask questions as well! For many of my
students who are ESOL students they still do not understand what a question is,
but I know if I continue to model it for them during reading they will grasp
the concept before first grade!
As readers students need to know what
questions matter. They also need to understand when we ask a question there is
always an answer that goes along with it. As a teacher when we see students
being to ask questions and search for answers we know they are monitoring their
comprehension which is what we hope for!
The first strategy I came across was “Share
Your Questions About Your Own Reading.” I use this strategy all the time,
across all subject areas when I am reading with my students. This is how I
model questioning for my students. With this strategy you can show students
with sticky notes how you ask a question and then when you find the answer
later on you can write it down and move the sticky note to where you found the answer.
I am always modeling how to ask questions with my students, but many times I do
not go back and find the answer to the question. After reading through this
strategy if I use the sticky notes I will then be able to go back with my
students and find the answers with them.
The next strategy that I found
interesting was “Some Questions Are Answered, Others Are Not.” Reading with
kindergarten students many of them can give you answers for the explicit
questions where answers are found in the text, but they struggle with the implicit
questions. When doing our FAIR testing at the beginning of the school year I
only had 3 students who answered these 2 questions correctly after listening to
the read-aloud story. I know this is an area I need to focus on with my
instruction so using this strategy would be beneficial for the majority of my
students!
I enjoyed this chapter on questions
but I found many of the strategies were geared toward students in a higher
grade level. For many of the strategies there are ways that I could differentiate
the strategy to connect to my kindergarten students. Most of the
differentiation would involve a lot of teacher modeling, but with my higher
students during guided reading I will start using some of the questioning
strategies with them.
