I hope that these questions will help guide book conversations with your child. At school, we are working hard to get students to think beyond basic retelling of stories. Retelling is important, but we want them to think more deeply about the books they are reading! Some comprehension strategies we practice as readers are: retelling, predicting, making inferences, asking questions, and visualizing. You can also always follow up answers with "How do you know that?" We want students to be in the habit of finding examples and clues from the text.
Questions- Fiction Texts
Does this story remind you of another story you've read? Has this ever happened to you?
Tell me about the setting of the story. What words did the author use to describe the setting to his readers? What do you think we would see or hear if we were in the story? {visualizing}
Tell me about the character. What is the character like? (Encourage them to think beyond happy, sad, mad...) How do you know that? What clues did the author give you in the story?
Why do you think the character make that choice? Would you have done the same thing the character did? {making inferences}
How do you think the character felt when that happened? {making inferences}
Stop before the end of the story and make a prediction. What do you think will happen next? Why do you think that? (Encourage them to give specific clues from the text) {predicting}
How did the character change in the story?
What was the main problem of the story? How did the character solve their problem?
Were there any interesting words that the author used? Could you use those words in your own writing?
How did the author make this story interesting to you as a reader? You could use those same skills as a writer!
If reading a chapter book, ask your child about what happened in the last chapter or the last time you read.
Questions- Nonfiction Texts
Before reading, preview the table of contents, pictures, and headings. Ask your child what he/she wants to learn from reading this book. Do they have any questions about this topic?
What was this book mostly about? Why is this topic important?
What details were important to the main idea of this book?
How did the author make it easy for the reader to find information? (Look for your child to talk about specific text features- pictures & captions, glossary, table of contents, headings, maps, graphs, charts...)
Why do you think the author wrote this book?
How does this (chart, map, graph...) help you as a reader?
Discuss the answers that found to their questions from before reading. Are there any questions we still have? Maybe we can find another book about this topic that will help us find these answers!