questions with bloom's taxonomy

Woow, it's been awhile since my last post. First there was spring break, and then there was all the craziness of coming back. Questioning is still going well. I've been having guided reading groups practice asking questions as they read a book about the first man on the moon, and guided reading group New York has been doing the same with Hatchet. This has been a good way to start experimenting with different things to supplement with the questioning strategy, like teaching them the difference between "within the text", "beyond the text", and "about the text" questions, and finding the right key words to yield the best search results when they're researching on the internet. One thing that GR New York suggested today was categorizing the types of questions they'd asked before researching so that they didn't waste time looking for answers on the internet that they could simply read about in the book. Zeke has been particularly enthusiastic about the research process, maybe because I grade them now on their research performance. Nonetheless, his research is by far the most salient because he's looking up information that clarifies events in the story. For example, he looked up the sounds a porcupine can make today because he read a chapter when Brian heard a strange sound and then ended up tripping into a porcupine, so he wondered if the porcupine had made that noise. Lower guided reading groups like Wisconsin tend to ask more "within the text questions". We used the final events and epilogue of The Watsons go to Birmingham - 1963 to launch into questioning about the Civil Rights movement. Here are the questions they asked as a class: -What age was MLK when he gave the "I have a dream" speech? -Was slavery happening in Birmingham in 1963? -Why didn't changing the law change the way people acted? -Did Malcolm X die before the church bombing? -Who is Malcolm X? -What's wrong with black people using white people's water fountains? -What is nonviolent resistance? -Why does somebody's skin color matter? -Why didn't the white people like the black people? -Were the black children able to learn? -Why did everything start changing after MLK and Malcolm X died? -How did white people gain control? -Who is Mohandas Ghandi? -Who made the laws? -Did somebody bomb the church? -Did white people who broke the law have to go to jail during the Civil Rights Movement? My task now is to get them to prioritize questions and be cognizant of the quality of their questions. I want to teach them how to categorize their questions according to Bloom's taxonomy. I think we'll first do this together, categorizing the Civil Rights questions. Then I'll ask them to work in partners to categorize their questions about Rosa Parks and Montgomery bus boycott that we learned about today. And we'll continue the process as we ask questions about each subsequent Civil Rights event. Hopefully the quality of their questions will improve and they'll ask more higher order questions, though I should stress to them that lower-order questions are useful and important as well for comprehension.