gr group tennessee

While he was reading to me, Dameko stopped and said I don't get it when he got to a sentence with a weird sentence structure: "The evening of Sunday, October 8, 2871 was a warm one in Chicago".  He reread it and then said "Oh, it was warm in Chicago".  Nyrissa also stops to write down questions spontaneously.  Darvell and Malik need more prompting to do this. When I ask Malik higher level questions, he's able to answer them pretty completely so maybe he's not stopping because he doesn't have miscomprehensions.  How to get him to want to stop and ask high level questions and investigate things further?  He needs differentiation. I conference with him about asking higher level questions and he asks a question about how people decided that Mrs. O'Leary's story about how the Chicago Fire started is the true one.

questions they prioritized individually to share:
-How did they rebuild the stuff?  How long did it take?  --> understanding
-Did the lady die before what the news asked her how did the fire start? --> Malik thought it was evaluating, I disagreed because it was a fact, he changed it to remembering
-Why was the president not doing stuff to stop the fire?
-Why are the buildings made of wood?

What makes a question good to research?
Dameko: easy to research?  sometimes people will try to research but they don't know what to put
Nyrissa: I think it should be hard.  Like we should make it hard because we should make them think a lot.
Darvell: I think it should be like the same thing as Dameko's but different because if you're researching a question it might give you time to research and rethink about the question.
Nyrissa: i still disagree because it's going to be easy to research then they already know the answer.
Dameko: Malik we haven't heard from you.
Malik: I agree with Nyrissa because I want people to challenge themselves.
Me: I love the conversation, can I add one thing?  it should be about an important main idea of the chicago fire.
Malik: I wanna know if important people died during the fire.
Nyrissa: I don't want to know that, I think we should combine two of the questions we had together. 

gr group Iowa

This is obvious but sometimes students don't ask questions about what they're reading because they understand what's going on in the book.  Iowa is reading Junie B Jones: Something Smells Fishy with me right now, and not writing down very many questions.  When I pressed Kamari about why he didn't write any questions after reading a sort of cliffhanger at the end of a chapter, he explained that he knew why Junie B. had called her grandma a genius- because Junie B. really was going to do what her grandma had joked about.  I think this group also may only be thinking about questions on a continuum between remembering and understanding, they may not have enough experience or practice asking higher level questions.  Kashira is writing a lot of inferences in her notebook and one question: "why would she go to look for a raccoon in the morning?"

Group share:
Kashira: I think Junie B. is picky.  Aniyah agrees.
Anyah: What do Junie B. get from her grandma?
Kamari: I think it's obvious from the cover that it's a fish from the cover, and her grandma said it wouldn't bite and stuff.
Kamari: Did Junie B. catch a pet for pet day? (everyone shrugs)
Kashira:I can predict to that.  I predict that she is going to bring a fish on a leash and her teacher is going to tell her that she couldn't bring it unless she had it in a cage.
We talk about changing questions to make them clearer.
Trae: Do she like raccoons?
Anyah: I don't think she likes racoons because maybe she hasn't seen one.
Kashira: I think she do because when her mom was eating cereal she says that she's going to try to catch a raccoon. 

questions with gr group Texas

I told students to write down what they learned and questions they had after they finished reading a brief biography on President Obama.  I intentionally did not give them a format or organizer for writing this out in their notebooks.  Cyrus spontaneously wrote down: "Q Focus: President Barack Obama"!

questions that they wrote:
Emon: Why did President Obama do all these jobs like: being a teacher, lawyer, senator.
Dequawn: Who was he vs. in 2008.  And how old was he when he was a lawyer
Cyrus: Where was Michelle Obama first born?  What does President Obama do in office?  What is their daughter's favorite piano note?
Zion: Do Barack Obama like living in the White House?  Is Barack Obama's family rich?  Are there many rooms in the White House?

After we shared, I asked them to categorize their questions according to Bloom's Taxonomy.

Cyrus wanted to prioritize his question about what president obama does in office.  when i asked him why he wanted to prioritize that one he said that the other ones didn't fit in (I think he meant with his qfocus)

Zion prioritized her question about Barack Obama liking living in the White House.

Dequawn prioritized the question of who he was running against?  

questions with gr group California

It's the much anticipated 1st day of guided reading and I'm already blown away!  California is my lowest guided reading group and we were reading a level G book called "Rex Runs Away" about...you guessed it, a run away dog!  Even though it was a simple text, Tremayne asked some very good questions and the answers that they had really reflected good comprehension of the text.

Tremayne's questions:
1. Why did Rex get a bone for running away? --> great critical thinking, he's evaluating Rex's actions and thinking about how they don't merit a reward.  Demarrion did some nice thinking about Rex's character trait of being friendly and how that made people want to be nice to him
2. Why did Rex run away? (Tynajah also asked this question) --> probably the big question of the book.  Demarrion and Tremayne both thought it was because he wanted to get food.  This was a solid inference because they noticed that all the places Rex stopped were food places.  Tynajah thought it was because he wanted the boy to chase after him
3. Why did he dig a whole? --> not a super-deep question, obviously to escape.

Interesting to note that he asked 3 analyzing questions, probably reflects a good understanding of the book.