Wonderopolis: Students Writing Questions

Last week I into introduced Wonderopolis to my class during our reading workshop time. For the first week, my goals included:
-nonfiction attributes on a web page
-connect reading book strategies with non fiction reading on the web 
-continue to focus on increasing vocabulary using inferences and context clues
-continue to predict and ask questions as a reader
-finally introduce 3 level of questions (Literal, Inferential, Evaluative) LIE


This week my goals continued however, I wanted to focus on the students writing literal and inferential questions. As a class we have worked on these two types of questions all year in our read aloud, JR reading, poetry Friday, Scholastic News articles etc. I have always written the questions, so I decided this week I would have my students write the questions. I hoped to challenge the students to read the article differently-searching for facts that would create a question.


Every Thursday, I have six students leave my room for the entire day for enrichment services. I decided to introduce this idea on Thursday for two reasons first smaller numbers make instruction easier. I wanted the students who were with me to take the lead and be able to "teach" the concept on Friday during reading. This idea has been very powerful in my class this year. 

Questions below my dry erase board

As you can see from the picture, there were four parts to the students writing the inferential questions. We posted their thinking below our dry erase board.


-preview sticky note on the left about which Wonderopolis article they chose
-white vocabulary word from the OAA list of Bloom's verbs
-sentence strip with their question
-finally the answer to the question is on a sticky note behind the verb card


This has been very successful and I plan to continue with higher blooms verbs including evaluative next week.