Questions, Questions, Questions

Guided Reading is one piece of a balanced literacy program. During this time, a teacher works with a small group of students to build skills to enable them to become better readers. The teacher helps students learn to use reading strategies, such as context clues, making predictions, and summarizing as they read a text or book that is unfamiliar to them. The goal of guided reading is for students to use these strategies independently to becoming fluent, skilled readers. In order to best help students acquire these skills, support should be provided before, during, and after reading takes place.

How can we help children build these reading strategies for better comprehension? I think one of the best ways is by asking children questions and getting children to to ask questions related to the parts of the story. These bookmarks provide the questions to help children remember what they need to be thinking about while they are reading.

• Characters: Who is in the story?

• Setting: Where does the story take place? What time?

• Problem: What trouble does the character have?

• Solution: How was the problem solved?

• Main idea: What is this text mostly about?

Having conversations with children before, during, and after reading is another great way to encourage the building of these reading strategies and to increase comprehension. The questions on these bookmarks could be used to start those discussions. These questions could also be used for reading reflection journals.

My 4 year old is definitely not ready for a formal guided reading lesson, but I can ask her questions like the ones on these bookmarks when we are reading a story together.  We can talk about the characters, the setting, and the problems in the story. I think these questions can be used with children of any age. I would expect better answers from children as they move up the fluency ladder, but just starting these conversations is moving in the right direction.