Asking Questions

A blog post for staff training

One way to engage children in storytime is to ask questions.  This is beneficial in many ways such as: connecting the story to their lives, verbal skills, expressing self, learning from their peers, listening skills, predicting, inferring, and developing critical thinking skills.  We can ask many questions before, during and after reading a book.

This can be tricky, however, when you have a large group for storytime or if you have a group that tends to lose focus easily.  Here are a few tricks that can help you to ask more questions.

At the beginning of most storytimes ask a question to get the children thinking about the theme.  These are usually questions that can be answered yes/no by the raise of hands.  For example, “How many of you like to eat cookies?”  You can then ask about different kinds of cookies, such as chocolate chip and Oreo.  You can even throw in a “trick” question to see how well they are listening! “Who likes to eat cookies with worms?” 

Ask questions that allow children to answer in unison.  This works when there is just one “right” answer—such as:

•  What animal is this?
•  What sound does this animal make?

However, it’s important to ask more complex questions as children get older such as:

• What are they doing?
•  What do you think will happen?
•  Why do you think they are doing that?
•  What does this picture tell you about the story?

Two ideas that can help encourage answers to these more complex questions:

Before you ask a question tell the children that you want them to tell the answer to their adult. 

Announce that you will call on x number of children (three for example).  This works well if you will be asking several questions.  When you ask the next question call on children that didn't already answer a previous question.

Asking questions helps to not only engage children in storytime, but to help develop listening, verbal, and critical thinking skills.