Literal Vs. Inferential Questioning

So, I'm not gonna lie! I pretty much used the same exact plans that Mary from Teaching with a Mountain View has on her blog for Literal & Inferential Questioning. You can check out her activities here. We did it all. Here's the breakdown.

Day 1: Anchor Chart & Foldable
Day 2: Task Cards
Day 3: Book Questions Rotation
Day 4: Create Our Questions
Day 5: Library Day

What I really want to talk about today is what went down on Day 4. Does some of your best teaching come at the spur of the moment? I had planned for students to use the books Mary used for her book questions along with some I already had. Students were going to create 2 literal and 2 inferential questions. It was really up to them if they wanted to do just one page or several.

As I was explaining the assignment, it hit me... this would be a GREAT activity to include DOK questions. So, (like I always do.. thank God my room is near the copier) I quickly found a DOK questions stem handout. We then went over what each level meant and what the questions look like. I encouraged them to include at least 1 DOK level 3 questions and the remainder needed to be either DOK 2 or 3. They were so excited to create questions like a teacher! We didn't really go near the DOK 4 questions because they are more for product-type results.

You can download the handout here. I have included what it looks like below.

As we were discussing DOK levels, I spoke to the students that these levels are similar to digging. I have a shovel hanging on my wall that I reference to when I want the students to think deeper. I always tell them to dig deeper :) One of my sweet students decorated a shovel and gave it to me as my end of the year gift last year. You may have seen it on my Instagram before.

I then drew a {horribly illustrated} sketch of a hole being dug into the earth. The first sketch was just scratching the surface of the dirt. I told the students this was like DOK level 1. It just scratches the surface of information and doesn't require a lot of thinking. These types of questions are okay, but we really want to stay away from them. Especially in 5th grade! I then drew a hole that was a little deeper. This represented DOK 2 questions. I'm guessing you kind of get the picture. The students had a lot of fun with this! I think the connection to the DOK levels to using a shovel to dig a hole really helped them.

The students then gathered sticky notes and got to work. They placed the sticky with their question on it on the page the question was from. Once they were finished, they traded books with another partner pair and answered each other's questions. Once everyone was finished, the students shared their questions and placed them on an anchor chart based on whether or not the question was inferential or literal.