1. Ms. Maxwell Stage 2: Describe

2.  You have each taken a test to determine how well you keep your minds active while you are reading and remember what you have read.  Today you will begin learning the strategy.  It is called the Self-Questioning Strategy.

3. Does anyone know what ‘self’ means?

4. It is something you do with yourself and by yourself.

5. Does anyone know what ‘questioning’ means?

6.  It is the act of asking questions.  When we put these two words together we know the strategy we’re going to be learning involves asking ourselves questions.  That’s exactly what you’ll be doing when you use the Self-Questioning Strategy.  You’ll be asking yourself questions as you read.

7.  After you ask a question, you’ll make a prediction and you’ll look for the answer to your question and check whether your prediction was correct.  What is a prediction?

8.  Whenever possible, you’ll be guessing or predicting the answer to the questions that you ask yourself.  Each time you make a prediction, you’ll be making the best guess that you can based on your knowledge.  We call this an “educated guess” because it’s based on what you have learned.

9.  You will be looking for the answers to see if your predictions are correct.  Thus, the Self-Questioning Strategy involves asking yourself questions, making predictions, and finding the answers to your questions in the passage you are reading.

10.  Before we talk about this strategy, let’s discuss what reading is and why we read.  What is reading?  What is the purpose of reading? Why do we read?

11.  Reading is making meaning out of printed information.  The purpose of reading is to learn new things and use what we read to help us live our lives successfully.

12.  In order to do that, we need to understand what we have read, think about it, and evaluate it in light of what we already know, and to store the information we need to remember in our memory banks.  Why might we want to store information in our memory banks?

13.  We might want to talk about it with our friends or we might want to use it in a class discussion.  Why use the Self-Questioning Strategy?

14.  When you learn the Self-Questioning Strategy to ask yourself questions, make predictions, and find the answers to your questions, you will find that you keep your mind active while you are reading.  You will pay attention to what you read, and you will want to read more.  As a result, you will be better able to understand and remember what you have read.

15.  If you understand and remember information better, how will this help you in school?  How do you think this will help you when you write book reports or reactions to a story you’ve read?

16.  You’ll be able to remember information for assignments and tests better, and, consequently, you’ll get better grades.  If you can describe what you’ve read, you have a good foundation for adding what you think about what you’ve read.  If you can’t remember what you’ve read, it’s pretty hard to have any thoughts about it.

17.  You can use the Self-Questioning Strategy any time you are reading about something, and you want to make sure you understand and remember it.  Can you think of situations where you need to read something, and understanding and remembering the information is important?

18.  We’ve seen that understanding and remembering written information can help us in a variety of ways in school, in preparing for a job, in learning to drive, and even in conversations with our friends.

19.  Other students who have learned the Self- Questioning Strategy have been pleased with the results they have achieved. Grade-Level Materials Before Instruction After Instruction 46%86%

20.  Before they began using the Self-Questioning Strategy, these students were able to answer correctly only 46% of comprehension questions about materials written at their grade level.  However, after they started using the strategy, they could correctly answer 86% of the questions about materials written at their grade level.

21.  This shows that students remembered more information after they had learned the strategy in reading materials that were written several grade levels above their reading level.  On average, they progressed from an ‘F’ to a ‘B’ on tests over the information they read, and you can, too!

22.  Step 1: Attend to clues as you read  In the first step, you start reading, and you look for clues that can help you create your questions.  A clue helps you by giving you hints on how to keep your mind active. They help you solve the mystery of what the passage you’re reading is about.  Look for things that make you wonder, that makes you curious. Cue Card #2

23.  Titles and pictures might serve as clues that make you wonder and help you solve the mystery of what the passage is about and get your mind active.  The author often uses the first sentence of a passage or paragraph to give you clues about its meaning.  Other clues may take the form of bold-faced type or italicized words.

24.  These are the easiest clues to find because they jump right off the page at you!  They are the clues the author of the book has created to help you find the most important information in the book.  Other clues will be in the words themselves.  Let’s look at some example sentences that have word clues in them. Cue Card #3

25.  Remember, the clue words are the words that make you wonder about the information you are reading.  They might point out to you the most important information in the passage.  These words help you make your mind active.

26.  Step 2: Say some questions  This means that after you find a clue and start wondering about it, you say one or more questions to yourself.  When you ask a question, be sure to ask about information you haven’t learned already.  This helps you want to read more so that you can find the answer to your question.

27.  There are seven types of questions that we will use to start. Cue Card #4 1. “Who” Question 2. “What” Question 3. “When” Question 4. “Where” Question 5. “Why” Question 6. “Which” Question 7. “How” Question

28.  “Who” Questions  Might be used when you wonder about a person.  For example, “Who will the passage be about?”  We use a symbol of a face for this question because this kind of question refers to people and people have faces.

29.  “What” Questions  Might be used when you wonder about a thing- something that is not a person.  Example, “What is he carrying in his backpack?”  We use a symbol of a box to represent this type of question because it is a thing. You may ask yourself what is in the box?

30.  “Where” Questions  This type of a question is about a place.  For example, “Where is the boy going?”  We use an arrow to represent this type of question.  Arrows show you where to go.

31.  “When” Questions  Use when you wonder about time.  For example, “When is the swamp monster going to pop out again?”  We use a clock face to represent this type of questions.

33.  “Which’ Questions  Use when there are two choices, and you wonder which one will happen.  Example, “Which road will she take?”  We use the symbol for an intersection of two roads to represent this type of question.

35.  Any time you ask a question, you need to mark its symbol on the reading passage.  This helps you keep your mind active, and it helps me know at which points you have asked questions and made prediction.  Conduct Practice- Cue Card #3 and #5

36.  Step 3: Keep predictions in mind.  Means that you guess what the answers to your questions might be (the questions from step 2).  Example, if your question is “What does this girl look like?”, what might you predict or guess that she look like?”  Your guess needs to contain information that the author hasn’t given you yet.  Sometimes you won’t be able to guess because you won’t have a clue as to the answer.

37.  Step 4: Identify the answer.  This means that you read some more, always keeping your question and prediction in mind.  As you read, you look for and find the answer to your question.  Example, after you’ve asked yourself, “What does the girl look like?” and you’ve made some predictions, you might find in the next few sentences that she has brown hair, brown eyes, and is wearing a purple raincoat.

38.  Step 5: Talk about the answer.  Means that you first think about the answer and then compare it to your prediction.  Decide whether your prediction wad wrong or right.  Then you put the answer in your own words.  This means you talk about the answer to your question to yourself.

39.  Example, you might say, “The girl has brown hair and brown eyes. I was right about the eyes but wrong about her hair and what she was wearing. She has on a purple raincoat.”  Why do you think this step is important?

40.  Thinking and talking about something helps you store it in your brain.  You use your own words to talk about it, and, as a result, you make the information your own.  When you own it, you remember it!  Conduct Practice- Cue Card #7

41.  After you have done all five steps you need to do them again.  Cue Card #8  The big arrow on the cue card from step 5 to step 1 indicates that, after you talk about an answer, you need to go back to the first step of the strategy and start attending to clues again.

42.  You will only read a few more sentences.  As you read them, you will search for new clues as well as for the answers to the questions you’ve already asked.  Steps 1 and Step 4 are written next to each other because you can do them at the same time.

43.  You might ask a question that the author does not answer in the passage.  This is okay because you are keeping your mind active just by asking the question, making the prediction, and looking for the answer.  Remember, if you don’t find the answer to your question in the next one to two sentences that you read, you need to be looking for new clues and asking new questions.

44.  You can make a new prediction at any time.  If you have asked a question, made a prediction, read a bit more and find out information that indicates your prediction is not correct, make a new prediction.

45.  When you state your questions, predictions, and answers, these are the things you need to be sure to do:  Always use complete statements that include a subject and a verb.  Make sure your statements are accurate. That is, only include information that is related to what you have read and the clues you have found.

46.  Make sure each statement has new information in it. Don’t ask questions or make predictions about information you’ve already learned in the reading passage.  Make predictions about what you want to learn.  Finally, each of your statements must make sense. The predictions and answers need to relate to your questions, and another person must be able to understand them easily.

47.  What does the words “ASK IT” mean?  Notice that the words, “Attend,” “Say,” “Keep,” “Identify,” and “Talk” begin with the letters “A,” “S,” “K,” “I,” “T” and spell the words “ASK IT.”  The letters in these words help you remember the five steps of this strategy.  Display Cue Card #1 or 8

48. Questions?