What's a Question, Anyways?

Yesterday was the first day of school and I had this wonderful plan to get home from school and write all about how my day went and how third graders aren’t as scary as I thought. But then I found out my dad’s flight home from deployment had been bumped up a day and all my after school plans went out the window. My dad has been deployed since last June so it was a bit of a big deal.

Something I have learned in the last two days about my third graders, asking questions is not their strong point. I did a quick informal assessment of the kiddos ability today. I did a mini lesson looking at our Read Aloud book for the semester, There's A Boy in the Girl's Bathroom by Louis Sachar. Students had a chance to write a question they have about the book based on the cover and back of the book. I learned a lot about them from the question they wrote (or didn't). I will definitely be doing a lesson on questions in the next week.

My hope is that following our discussion about questions, we can also cut back on the number of comments/anecdotes we receive when we ask for questions. It is amazing what kind of tangents these kids can get themselves on when we ask if there are any questions. They seems to mistake "questions" for story time! ha! Today I whipped up this "Question Starts" Poster I am going to be hanging in the room and using in my lesson.

Feel free to snag the poster here if you have some of your own kiddos who struggle with differentiating between questions and statements. Sorry I haven't got much else to report on at the moment. Not that there isn't much to say, I just haven't had the time to collect my thoughts. More to come....