Bloom-ing Spring Questions and Book Ideas

                                                                

Blooming Questions

Throughout the year we encourage our language students to use higher order thinking skills to analyze, infer, and have students justify their answers. As a reference we use Bloom's Taxonomy when planning our questions and lessons with speech students. To recap. Benjamin Bloom developed this system to categorize intellectual skills. Bloom ranked them from basic knowledge (recall) to the highest level called evaluation (used to make decisions or justify answers). Below are some questions to get your students Blooming:

1. What is the best about Spring ? Why?
2. What is the first thing you will do when the snow melts?
3. Is Winter or Spring better? Why?
4. Where do you go to play or hang out in the spring?
5. The best spring holiday is ? Why?
6. On mother’s day I plan to …..
7. What would be a perfect Spring day to you? What would you do?
8. Baseball is the national pastime why do you think so?
9. What baseball team do you watch and why?
10. April shower’s bring May flowers. What does that mean to you?
11. People give baskets on May day. What would you put in yours?
12. Memorial day is a day to ______________________.
13. The best Easter tradition my family has is? Why?
14. What is Better Speech and Hearing Month?
15. Where does the Easter Bunny live?  Why
16. My favorite thing about warmer temps is….Why?
17. Where does the water go when the snow melts? If unsure, How could you find out? 
18. Some birds go away in Winter. Where do they go and why? 
19. Some ducks and geese stay all year round. How are they able to do that ? 
20. Why is Spring the best season? Give 3 reasons.        

Higher Order Thinking with Books 

When reading books at our students comprehension level we also use the same strategies of Higher Order Thinking Skills or HOTS. Below listed are two of our favorite books and questions designed to encourage higher order thinking.

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein:

Questions to encourage HOTS:

1. Is the boy selfish or selfless? Why?
2. Do you think the tree should say no sometime? Why or Why not?
3. What could the boy make out of her branches instead of a boat?
4. What does the boy learn and what does the tree learn?
5. What is the theme of the book?
6. When is a time you were selfish or selfless?

The Lorax by D. Suess:

Questions to encourage HOTS:

1. What should the lesson be to all of us?
2. Do you think Lorax was effective? Why or Why not?
3. What are 3 things you could do to make the environment better?
4. What part of the world does the Lorax happen in? Why do you think that?
5. What is the theme of the book?
6. Who is selfish or selfless?  Explain.