Ms. Maxwell
Stage 2: Describe
 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
 It
you will begin learning the strategy.
is called the Self-Questioning Strategy.
Does anyone know what ‘self’ means?
It is something you do with yourself and by
yourself.
Does anyone know what ‘questioning’ means?
 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.
 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?
 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.
 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.
 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?
 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.
 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?
 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?
 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.
 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?
 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.
 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?
 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.
 Other
students who have learned the SelfQuestioning Strategy have been pleased
with the results they have achieved.
Grade-Level Materials
Before Instruction
After Instruction
46%
86%
 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.
 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!
 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
 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.
 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
 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.
 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.
 There
are seven types of questions that we
will use to start. Cue Card #4
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
“Who” Question
“What” Question
“When” Question
“Where” Question
“Why” Question
“Which” Question
“How” Question
 “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.
 “What”



Questions
Might be used when you wonder about a thingsomething 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?
 “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.
 “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.
 “Why”



Questions
Use when you are wondering about the reason for
something or the cause of something.
For example, “Why did he do that?”
We use a capital ‘Y’ to represent this type of questions
because it’s sounds like ‘why.’
 “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.
 “How”



Questions
Use this type of question when you wonder hoe
something is going to be done or how someone is
going to get something done.
Example, “How is she going to get to the top of
that cliff?”
We use the capital letter H to represent this type
of question because the word How begins with an
 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
 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.
 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.
 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.
 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?
 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
 After
you have done all five steps you need
to do them again.
 Cue
 The
Card #8
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.
 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.
 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.
 You
 If
can make a new prediction at any time.
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.
 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.
 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.
 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
Questions?