More Than Just A House

We are in the middle of reading "The House on Mango Street" with a couple of groups. Students were asked to create questions about the story their reading, partly to get them out of the routing of reading-and-answering-questions, and to give them ample time to compose, edit, and pose questions to one another, and, of course, to work on their answers. They were encouraged to come up with questions that require more than a one-word response, beyond a simple 'name', 'date', 'place', or 'yes/no' answer. They struggled at first, but, with time on their side, they were able to generate appropriate questions that encourage their partners to make inferences based on the text, instead of merely looking up an answer that is spelled out for them in the story.