Comprehension

Many times we just throw out a question after we read a book to children.

Adult:"What happened to her hat?"
Child: "ummmm, it flew away..."

This is great for early literacy... a starting block. Did you know that children need to be taught to ask questions, just as much as they should be answering our comprehension questions.

One thing that is very important for comprehension are the skills of generating questions. Students should be creating questions in their mind, WHY? Because that is what GOOD readers do... while they are reading they create questions in their mind to keep interested and in order to retain the information.

We need to foster the skill of questioning in children by teaching them HOW to ask questions. For example: (while reading a book) I say: "That dog is scared! Can you think of a question you might have about this? Let me tell you my question... I wonder why the dog is scared? Can you think of a question?"

This process will be ongoing and will require a lot of modeling. But, with enough great modeling, they will become great question generators!