Responding to Reading: Responding to Questions *Freebie!
One question teachers frequently ask is, “How can I monitor my students’ understanding during a read aloud or shared reading?” Sometimes, it’s enough just to see what kinds of thoughts students are having as they read. Sometimes, though, I need to see a specific response to a purpose question. After playing with a few ideas, I tried out this reader’s notebook strategy for having students respond in a focused way to our read aloud or shared reading. The strategy is: question strips!
Before we read a section of text in class, I would read it myself and write a question or two that I thought might help students evaluate their thinking. I used question stems from our state assessment and other rigorous sources, in order to build students’ familiarity to the questions’ syntax.
I typed these questions up, and copied them until I had a series of them running down the page. I can usually fit 12 or so on one page. I printed them out (it often only took two sheets to get enough for each student in my class to have one) and then I cut them into strips.
After our shared reading or read aloud (in this case, Esperanza Rising was our shared reading, so everyone had a copy – great for citing evidence from the text), I handed out one question strip to each student. They took a glue stick and quickly zipped it across the page, and then stuck the strip on.
