Questions to Ask Everyday

“There are many ways to help students learn to craft quality constructed responses. It’s important to remember that the key is that students MUST demonstrate comprehension of the text through their responses. That means that their responses do not have to be grammatically sound, nor especially well written. They simply need to answer all parts of the question correctly.” –WritingFix.com (Constructed Response Page).

Things we Can Do to Prepare Students for Constructed Response testing:

• During Guided Reading, Read Alouds, Reader’s Workshop, Daily 5, etc., be sure to ask questions/model thinking each day. (see below)
• Give students at least one opportunity each day to “construct a response”. (“C.R. is, quite simply, a written response to a question.” – Kristi Pettingill). Students should be able to answer a question and defend/explain/support it in 2-3 sentences. This will be an essential skill in CR testing. Start practicing now!
• Give students at least one opportunity each day to use a graphic organizer.

Literary Analysis

• Why do you think the author refers to ______ throughout the story?
• What does he want you to think about when he does this?
• The author’s purpose for writing this is to _______.
• Let’s find the part that tells us this.
• Talk about the genre of this book ___ and its characteristics.

Main Idea

• What is the author’s point of view?
• What is the perspective of this author?
• What is the author trying to tell us in this story?
• What is the author’s message?
• What is the story mostly about?
• What is the gist of this par to the story?

Word Meanings

• What emotion does the author describe with the phrases ___?
• What does this word mean in this story?
• What does this word mostly mean?
• This word is like __ .
• Can you think of another word like this?
• How is this word like___?

• Questions: What do you think the author is trying to tell us in this story?
• Comments: I noticed that the author was trying to tell us that…
• Modeling: I’m thinking the author’s message in this story is __ because __.