Better Research Questions

I realized that my kids connected so well to Malcom by thinking about his story. Even before they read the text, they asked, "Why did he do what he did to get sent to prison?" That can be linked to the idea of character's motivation in narrative structure, something we've been learning about all year.

So, I decided to have them write their questions about their new research topics on a story mountain that shows the parts of a story. You'll see my model and a few of the kids' below:



In blue I put a few examples of the questions that they had asked about Malcom when we made a KWL chart at the beginning of the book about him.

Today I added my own questions about my own research topic, "the beginning of slavery," in blue.








I like how she asked about the disagreement between the Nation of Islam and Malcom.


I like how Samuel, below asked about Frederick Douglas' parents. I think he's connecting to some information we learned from Malcom about how slaves didn't know their parents' or grandparents' names.
























I like how he put the question about slaves in the south as part of the "characters" component of narrative structure.