Simple Texts, Complex Questions: Helping Young Children Generate Questions

As they are naturally curious about the world around them, young children ask lots and lots of questions. In classrooms today, however, there seems to be little space for these student-generated questions as teachers are more likely to pose the questions. Research indicates that question generation is an effective strategy to motivate young readers, to build reading comprehension, and to foster higher-level thinking skills. In addition to exploring the cognitive and motivational benefits of questioning, this article showcases how students can generate complex, juicy question from simple texts--in this case, nursery rhymes.