The Question of the Day routine… You may have heard of it, but you might be confused about what it is. How does it work? Is it just for fun or does it help kids learn? Do you have to think of new questions EVERY SINGLE DAY? Keep reading to answer these questions and learn some hacks to make the Question of the Day routine work in your classroom.
What is Question of the Day?
Question of the Day is a classroom routine where the teacher poses a question and students share their response. The question is usually displayed in the room for students to read. Students can sign their names or place pocket chart cards with their names under their response. Some teachers discuss these responses during morning meeting or use them to create a graph during math time.
You can use the Question of the Day from Day 1 of school with back to school questions.
Why Use Question of the Day?
You may be surprised at how much learning can happen from this quick little routine. These questions can support language arts, math, science, social studies and social/emotional learning in the following ways:
Language Arts:
- reading for an authentic purpose
- learning sight words
- using picture cues
- reading names of classmates
- writing first names (or last names, or initials)
- learning new vocabulary words
These winter themed questions include common high frequency words.
Math:
- counting responses
- creating graphs
- comparing total responses (using words like more/less)
- recording totals with numerals
Science/Social Studies:
- using new vocabulary in meaningful ways
- making connections between content areas
- make predictions for experiments
These plant-themed questions are perfect for spring!
Social/Emotional Learning:
- learning more about classmates
- recognizing similarities and differences among classmates
- making connections to one another
Learn more details about the academic benefits in this post. You’re going to find that it’s a routine that’s just too beneficial to ignore!
How do you start?
First, think of some simple questions. You might want to start with a question that can be easily adapted, such as “Do you like _____?” You can then change the final word each day, using colors, sports or foods. This simple question stem can lead and endless supply of questions.
After a while, you can make your questions slightly more complicated by providing two choices: “Do you like _____ or _____?” Write a basic question like this on a sentence strip, leaving long blank spaces for the two choices. Write the choices on short cards (or index cards). All you have to swap out each day is the card for the final word. Easy peasy!
Student response cards can be as simple as small index cards, student photos or punched out die-cut shapes with student names them. For young students, you can add small photos to go with the names.
You can squeeze this routine into various parts of the day:
- attendance
- morning meeting
- math
How do you adapt it for an online school?
Building a sense of community is still important, even in an online school. Many teachers have found a way to continue this routine to use in a virtual classroom. You can post the questions on your digital learning platform (like Seesaw or Google Classroom.) Then students can respond to them by writing their names, circling their response, or leaving a voice recording.
For more details about what this would look like in Seesaw, I have written a step-by-step tutorial. It describes how to upload images for the question of the day and assign the question, if you are new to Seesaw.
What else should I know?
Want to learn more about how to include this simple routine in your day. Read this post to find out more about how to use question of the day.
Then move on to this post to see ways to display and organize your daily questions.
If you are worried about the time (or mental energy) involved in creating the questions, visit my store for ideas. There are questions for the entire school year, as well as questions to match science themes (like plants, insects or the farm) and fun themes, too (like fairy tales.)
If you want to learn more about morning meeting activities, check out this post. It is jam packed with fun activities!
Hopefully these tips and tricks will make it easy for you to add the Question of the Day routine to your morning meeting. Your kids will have so much fun with it that they won’t even realize that they are learning!
Save time by grabbing an entire year’s worth of pre-made questions at once by visiting my store. No more time wasted coming up with a new question every day!
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Questions of the Day sets featured in this post:
