It’s Day 2 of Celebrate Reading Month on The Inspired Apple! I’m glad you stopped by! Today, we’ll cover the types of questions to ask while reading to help students identify key ideas and details within a text.

During our undergrad preparation for our education degrees, most of us paid at least a small amount of attention to Bloom’s Taxonomy.  (If you’re not familiar or need a refresher, go check out this ‘cheat sheet’ that will give you a quick synopsis of his work.)  In short, Bloom describes different types of questions to ask while reading in order to help students think more critically, thereby increasing their comprehension and problem-solving skills. To be honest, I probably learned enough about it during college to ace the chapter quiz and didn’t think much more about it until I was teaching my own classroom of students.

Today, we’re going to discuss Level I questions. Level I of Bloom’s Taxonomy addresses knowledge by asking questions that are largely based on recall. I actually made my students this poster and we referenced it before, during and after reading our literature selection. Clearly, these are very basic questions and students simply rely on their memory to answer the questions.

You can also provide your students with these question stems for them to access while they’re reading individually or in a small group. I’ve made a set for you that you can grab and use with your own kiddos. Each on is Common Core aligned and lists the standard it correlates with right on the mini-poster. Ideally, you would display these in your classroom, but you could also add them to a ring and keep them for students to use at their seats or at a reading center.

Grab them for yourself by clicking the graphic below!