We've been busy learning that good readers ask questions while they read. We first had to learn what a question is! We spent some time thinking about what words we would use to ask a question. Kindergarteners are very good at asking questions, but it's usually when they are not thinking about it. Interestingly it is when you want them to ask a question when they start telling you all sorts of stories and connections instead of a question.
Here is a chart we made to help us remember what words questions typically start with:
In addition to talking about question words, we discussed why readers ask questions. We put that on our chart as well.
We practiced asking questions for both fiction and non-fiction texts. We read many fictional texts, but one that stands out is
Charlie Anderson. Ask your child to retell that story to you at home. It was such a surprising book, and asking questions really helped us make the story more clear--just like readers!
We read many non-fiction texts, too, but one topic that stood out is penguins. With a non-fiction text, we started off thinking about what we already knew and what we wanted to know--which generated a lot of questions! Our next job was to read about penguins and see if we could find the answers to our questions. Below is a picture part of our findings. The green notes were things we already knew before reading and were confirmed by our reading. The yellow notes were questions we had before we read anything and we added questions on yellow notes as they came up during our reading. The red notes are for new learning. Some of our new learning answered some of our questions. We tried to match up the yellow question with the red answer.
We learned that sometimes readers have questions that the author didn't answer. Time for more research!
When reading at home with your child, feel free to share questions about a story or topic you have and see if you can find the answers in the text!
No comments:
Post a Comment