Questions Worth Asking a Text

Step 1: Before You Read

Watch the idea first — 61 seconds. Then read on, and try it yourself in the next step.

Some questions have one answer and stop. Others open the text. Today you learn to tell which you are about to ask.

Today’s story

The Last Day of the Pool

A piece of writing about a swimming pool closing. About 300 words.

Step 2: Read the Story

One part at a time. Press Listen, or read it yourself. The tutor reads along with you.

The tutor shows

The Corn Street baths opened in 1908 and closed on a Tuesday in August, and for the last hour they let anybody in for nothing. There were more people in the water that afternoon than there had been on any day Idris could remember, and he had been coming since he was four.

The tiles round the shallow end were the color of weak tea where the water had been for a hundred and sixteen years, and green in the corners nobody could reach with a brush. The high windows threw long bars of light across the surface, and the noise came back off the roof the way it always had, so that everybody sounded like they were shouting from further away than they were.

At four o’clock the attendant blew the whistle and everybody got out. Nobody argued about it.

What makes the second question better?

They opened the valve at half past. Idris sat on the edge with his feet in and watched the level drop past the second tile, and then the third, and after a while he could not feel the water any more.

The deep end went last. It took nearly an hour, and by the end there were fourteen people left in the building, standing round the rail and not talking much.

Underneath, where the water had been, there was a drain, a lost pair of goggles, and a two-pence piece.

Somebody said it was a shame. Somebody else said the roof had wanted doing for years.

Idris walked home the long way.

Step 3: The Whole Story

Finish reading with the tutor, and the whole story appears here with its parts named.

Step 4: My Notebook

Finish the story first. Then write down two things you noticed.

Step 5: What You Learned

A retrieval question has one answer and stops there.
Why and how questions about a writer’s choices open a text.
A question you cannot answer at once is usually the good one.

For the grown-up

Children generate retrieval questions because that is what they are asked. The distinction worth teaching is between a question answered by pointing and a question about the writer’s choices, and the tell is whether you can answer it immediately.

When your child asks a question about a book, ask whether they could answer it by pointing at a word.