In addition, Hermilo wants to become an expert on radios, and I could show the special footage on the DVD of how the film crew uses recording equipment to document the sound and lives of the birds in their migrations as a link to his interest.
become engaged with the sequence of a boy releasing a trapped bird, and their voices call out.
I realize minutes into this segment that I can hear them asking questions. Cole asks, “Why can’t they fly away?”
Sidney whispers, “Why are those birds moving like that?”
Byron wonders, “What are they doing?”
I smile, my eyes moving back and forth from students to the screen, listening to their questions and believing we have turned a corner. I stop the DVD after our twenty-minute viewing. I ask,
“What are your questions?”
Ryan says, “The goose, it was lost. . . . He was sad.” He retells part of the movie, then asks, “Does the goose find his friends?”
Jake contributes, “The goose almost snowed down. Did they fall down the mountain?”
This reading workshop time doesn’t provide me with many answers about teaching the questioning strategy; rather, I am bom-barded with my own questions. What makes the concept of asking a question so difficult for five- and six-year-olds? What helps the children ask genuine questions of this “text”? Is it that they have a significant schema built up on birds? Is it the different medium?
I know that although we made a valiant attempt at asking ques-tions in response to a book last week, it didn’t work.
Yet now, days later, the children are asking questions before, during, and after the movie. I’m glad I’m asking questions I don’t know the answers to, and I realize that for the first time in this strategy, the students and I are working hard to make sense of what we know.
By the time we have seen the last chunk of the movie, the stu-dents are asking powerful questions, and they are passionately involved. During the rain-forest scene where a boat carries caged animals down a river, the children get very quiet. Then I hear Ryan asking the question that many students may have been wonder-ing. “It’s sad. Why don’t they let them out? They’re sad, Andie.”
He tells the bird on the screen, “That’s the way out” as it fig-ures out how to open its cage and fly away. Ryan claps his approval of the bird’s escape.
After the movie, Cole, Sidney, Sabinna, and Daniel all ask ques-tions about how the bird got out of its cage. Byron also thinks about the bird’s escape, but his question is different: “When the bird got out of his cage, there was a big sound. What was the sound?”
Ryan brings up a question I had never thought about. In one scene, the adult penguins huddle around an egg, then a penguin chick, serving as protectors. Ryan wonders, “The penguins jump.
How do the bodies form a circle?”
I am hopeful we can capture their questions to create our next text for the class to read together. I have three six-foot-long sheets of butcher paper, each labeled with a different questioning start:
“How?” “Why?” and “What?”
I explain to the children what the posters say and invite them to draw and write their biggest question from the movie on the appropriate poster. As Ruth and I watch, the children create pic-tures that are full of details and colors. We write their questions next to their pictures, documenting their thinking in their own words (see Figures 5.2 and 5.3).
Of course, some of the questions recorded on the large sheets have already been asked, such as Leteshia’s. Next to her picture, we record her words: “The kid on the first day, the picture that freed the bird—I want to know how he freed the bird.” She’s held that question for three days, since our discussion of the opening scene.
Cole asked a similar question during the movie, in wondering,
“Why can’t they fly away?” But Cole’s question has changed. Now he wonders, “How did the bird get out of the cage?” Many class-mates ask the same question.
Figure 5.2 Children work on the “How?” anchor chart for Winged Migration.
The questions the students asked before and after the first day’s film segment were all “closed” questions: ones that could be answered by a yes or a no. By day two, questions start with words such as, “Why?” “Where?” “How?” By the time the students put their questions down on paper, they are no longer confined to lit-eral yes/no questions; rather, they are eager to explore more open questions.
I see examples of this from Rosa, who asks, “Quien habla?”
(Who is speaking?) No one else—me included—had wondered out loud who the narrator was. Byron makes an interesting link to the rain forest with his question, “The bird tries to fly through stormy rain like a butterfly. How do they fly different?” Hermilo takes my thinking to a whole new level by comparing the wings of a bird to the headset for a telephone: “Como estas su salas como uno telefono?”
Through this project, I hear the voices of my English language learners rise up. All of a sudden, language is not a limitation for any of us, either in the delivery of the text or in the communica-tion of what they understand or wonder about. Although I can speak some Spanish, I am no longer the primary voice who trans-lates and speaks for Rosa, Hermilo, and Iliana.
Because this documentary does not rely on spoken words and because we returned to the text again and again, language was no
Figure 5.3 Andie helps children write on the “I wonder what” chart for Winged Migration.
longer a limitation in our classroom. We extended the time we spent on the text and opened up different ways to express ques-tions through drawing, moving, writing, and talking. What worked for the English language learners worked for the native English speakers.