How Can You Stretch Students' Thinking?
Apply the QAR strategy to content area material. Have students gather specific questions from various content areas, find the answers, determine the categories of questions, and create a QAR visual. Ask students to analyze and look for trends in the examples they found. Ask, "Are there any subjects that use only one or two types of question-answer relationships?"
Have students develop a method to teach the QAR strategy to another class.
Give different reading passages to several small cooperative groups. Have each group write four types of questions, based on the QAR strategy, on index cards. On the backs of the cards, have students answer the questions, categorize the question-answer relationships, and briefly explain their processes. Make this a part of your "what you can do when you are done" work. Groups can then exchange cards, find the answers to the questions, and check the backs of the cards to see if they agree with the group that wrote them.
Based on a given reading passage, provide students with answers and ask them to write questions and categorize the question-answer relationships.
When Can You Use It?
Reading/English
The QAR strategy can be used to discuss questioning. Discuss how active readers use questioning during their independent reading to ensure accurate comprehension. Tell students that active readers use questioning before reading to activate prior knowledge, during reading to ensure comprehension, and after reading to reflect on and summarize what was read. Emphasize the types of questions you ask yourself.
Writing
Have students use QAR to discuss questions about pieces of writing. Students can write their own question-answer relationships about a classmate's essay, an editorial in the school newspaper, and so on.
Math
Have students develop word problems based on the four types of questions in the QAR strategy. Discuss the process that students went through. Ask, "Were there some types of questions that were easier to write than others? Were there some types of questions that did not work with a certain situation? Why?" Have students keep a math journal in which they identify examples of each question type.
Social Studies
Have students use the QAR strategy to develop review questions for a chapter test. In small cooperative groups, students can use their textbook and their notes to develop "test questions" and justify why they would be good questions.
Science
Look at the focus questions at the beginning or end of the chapter in a textbook. Have students categorize and then answer the questions. Have students examine how they categorized the questions, and make changes if needed, based on their answers.
Lesson Plans
Lesson Plan: Questioning, Frog and Toad Together
This lesson is designed to expand primary students' skills in questioning, using the Question-Answer Relationships (QAR) strategy. In this lesson, you will teach students how to use QAR by reading from Frog and Toad Together, by Arnold Lobel and modeling QAR questions as you read. Students will then learn how to generate QAR questions on their own. This is the third lesson in a set of questioning lessons designed for primary grades. Try lessons one and two: Questioning, The Mitten and Questioning, Koko's Kitten.
Primary Question-Answer Relationships
This lesson introduces primary students to the QAR strategy.
Intermediate Question-Answer Relationships
This lesson introduces intermediate students to the QAR strategy.
