Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading Workshop Journal

A MiddleWeb Listserv Project

Self-selected members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List are joining together to explore the Reading Workshop and other ideas about supporting young adolescent readers. Juli Kendall, a reading teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion. Juli is also keeping a weekly journal of her own Reading Workshop initiative. Find out more about our project at our Reading Workshop homepage. You'll find Juli's background article here. Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.

Week #20
Our Kids Get into Questioning
and Learn on a New, Absorbing Level


Whatever else people say about using questioning during reading -- and they say quite a lot -- it's a strategy that's been known for enhancing students' own understandings of text. That's what we hoped for as we taught questioning to our students. (See Journal #19 for more background.)

So how did it go in class? My surprise was immediate. I expected that this strategy would challenge the students over their English language level or their familiarity with creating questions. What I did not expect was that questioning would be as natural as the Making Connections strategy piece had been. For our students one seems to logically follow the other.

First, the involvement and the interest are so high in the classroom that it's like "seeing" learning on a new, absorbing level. Most remarkable, however, is how many reservations I had stored up in the "getting ready stage" by focusing on the organization of Read Aloud books and mini lessons. I was concentrating so hard on the lesson delivery that I didn't even notice that the kids were "ready to go" on this one.

When it came time to begin, it was the poetry we read daily that provided the "teachable moment." Jack Pretlutsky, our current poet, has a humorous piece in his volume, Monday's Troll.
Every inch of him was covered
With a greasy mat of hair,
When I blinked my eyes in wonder,
Bigfoot was no longer there.
From "I Thought I Spotted Bigfoot"

It prompted so many questions that we just jumped right in and started writing them on a t-chart, one side labeled Questions and the other side labeled Facts.

Class Questions about "I Thought I Spotted Bigfoot"

Before reading:
Where did Bigfoot come from? Where does he live?
Does he or she have a family?
Where are his mom and dad? Is he married?
Is he from outer space? How did he get here?
Does he still exist? Is he a Yeti?
During reading:
Is he fast? Is he strong?
Does he have one foot or two?
Why do they call him Bigfoot if he has two feet?
After reading:
Doesn't he live in the woods? (The poem is set in the city!)

We used our own questions as the "think aloud" modeling and took off from there. Bookmarks were passed out, Reading Journals were opened and filled with t-charts, and readers were off to record their questions as they worked in Independent Reading.

The students' questioning during Read Aloud was so captivating that I was oblivious to their interactions during Partner Reading. That's where the kids themselves pointed out to me how they were using the Questioning bookmarks to organize their conversations. During Partner Reading they shared questions from their individual books, and then, using the bookmarks, worked on reading and questioning together following the pattern we used for Making Connections.

Whoa! I even missed that Ramon had skipped reading levels, on his own initiative, and was beginning a terrific level T book, Because of Winn Dixie, a 2001 Newbery Honor Award winner. Here's how it opens:
My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes and I came back with a dog. This is what happened: I walked into the produce section of the Winn-Dixie grocery store to pick out my two tomatoes and I almost bumped right into the store manager. He was standing there all red- faced, screaming and waving his arms around.

"Who let a dog in here?" he kept on shouting. "Who let a dirty dog in here?"
Remember, these are readers who didn't get to go to middle school because their reading levels were not high enough -- end of 3rd grade is the standard -- and this is easily a 5th-6th grade level text. As I conferenced with Ramon, I was truly impressed. His questions are incredible and show exactly how he is going about understanding what he is reading. Using them, I could easily track his thinking.

Ramon's Questions about Because of Winn Dixie

Before reading:
Does she or doesn't she work?
Does she have a mom?
Is she living without a house (homeless)?
During reading:
What is Winn Dixie? Oh, look it says, "the Winn-Dixie grocery store." It's a store.
Does she have a mom? It just says "my daddy the preacher, sent me to the store"
What's a preacher? Is it like a priest?
After reading:
Is she going to take the dog? Where did it come from?
What is she going to name it?
Later that morning: Wow! She named it the same as the grocery store, Winn Dixie.
What's the title mean?
Is it Winn Dixie, the dog, or Winn-Dixie, the store?

Now they're taking what they learned about questioning to the next level -- independence. This despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that questioning is so strongly identified with understanding. My new assumption, based on more "noticing" observations, is that they're going to maintain their use of the questioning strategy for many years to come.

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