Back to School Reading Comprehension Lesson Ideas
The beginning of the year is all about balancing back to school reading review lessons, refreshing memories on math content, and get to know you activities. Well, I am here to help you fuse two of them together with a literacy get to know you activity!
When I think of the first back to school reading review lessons and which comprehension strategies to focus on, I think of questioning and connections. These are the two skills that can double as a reading lesson while still prioritizing building your classroom community.
Back to School Reading Questioning Activity
What is questioning?
This comprehension strategy is all about tapping into students natural curiosity and encouraging them to think deeper about what they are reading and experiencing.
Our little learners 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grader students are big fans of what and why, we want to focus on getting them to use ALL of the question words.
Question words include: why, when, where, how, what, why, and who.
Find the perfect picture book mentor texts that I use to teach questioning here.
Planning for the engaging literacy activity
📸 Ask students to bring in a photo or item from home. You can make this open ended or give a category. Students can choose something that represents them or things they like.
If bringing something in seems too hard, students can draw a picture or share one sentence to prompt questions and interest from the class.
Students work in partners, small groups, or whole group to ask questions about the items brought in to share.
Questions can sound like:
I wonder…
-Where did you play with that basketball recently?
-Who is in that picture?
-How did you learn to bake?
-What material is that shirt made from?
Focus students on using the question sentence frame from Quinn The Questioner. Starting with this “I wonder…” helps to keep them on track and not have them start talking about themselves.
*Usually I encourage questioning lessons to focus on rapid fire questions without stopping to answer but this is slightly different.
💡 I do suggest writing all the questions down and having the student answer them all at the end. They can then share a little about what they brought in. This helps keep the focus on the questions for a while. After that, the complete focus can be on learning about the student.
💡 This next suggestion depends on the grade level. Students could have their object or drawing on their desk with a question sheet. Students could do a scoot (rotate around the room) to write down their question. After that, each student would get a turn to share and answer their classmates questions.
💡 Writing down the question words allows you to keep a chart of question words. You can tally which is used most often. You can challenge students to use other question words like why and how – they tend to not use these as much!
If you are worried about how long this activity will take, let me give you a suggestion. Stretch it out over a week or two with a few students each day!
Building Classroom Community Through Discussion
There are several ways that this literacy questioning activity enhances classroom community:
- helps each student feel special and important by having time focused on just them
- students show interest in each other with questions
- learning new information can make connections and spark friendships about things in common
- helps the teach learn about students individually and personal likes outside of school
More Resources for Teaching Questioning
Blog post- a peek into how I teach questioning
Blog post- pictures books for teaching questioning
Questioning Lesson Plan and Activities
