How to Get Kids to Ask Questions While Reading
- 1). Ask kids to prepare questions before they start to read. Approaching the text with questions like "What is the story about?" and "What is the main character's goal?" help kids to focus their reading. Use background information about the book, author, setting or subject to compose questions. Write down the questions on little notes and insert them randomly in the book. This helps to encourage question asking the whole time during the reading session.
- 2). Use notebooks to write down questions and thoughts that comes into mind while they are reading. Reading is not about finishing a section or a book as quickly as possible. Tell them to take their time and to have a pretend conversation with the author and the characters.
- 3). Model question asking while you are reading aloud for kids. Say what questions that comes into your mind when you are reading the title and looking at the front page. Balance your questions so that they do not interrupt the flow of the reading too much.
- 4). Let kids practice their question asking skills by working in pairs. Use a familiar book and ask kids to read loud a page to their partner. While they are reading they can stop anytime and tell their friends about their thoughts and questions.
- 5). Talk about how you monitor your reading understanding. Often it is not necessary to understand every word in a text. Yet it is vital to ask yourself if you understand a sentence. Tell kids to put down a mark in notebook, for every word in a section they do not understand while they are reading. If they has put down three marks, they need to ask themselves if they understood that section. If not they should reread it.
- 6). Play a game where you write down questions about a character. Let kids read or listen to a short story. Ask them to think of as many question about the main character as they can. The questions are asked to the author. Prompt them to think about what the character's problem is and how he should solve it.