Using Question of the Day in the Classroom

One of my favorite parts of every single day in my preschool classroom is when it was time to ask the question of the day.  This was my chance to see where my students' heads were at that day, and to get to know them a little better.

I promise that it was a process to get our question of the day to a point where it was successful and the children would respond with thoughtful answers.  We had to model how to answer questions, and encourage them to think of their own unique answers instead of repeating the same answer as the person who answered before them.

Once the children learned how to handle the question of the day, it became an incredibly valuable tool.  We were able to use it to talk about opinions and the fact the we all have opinions, but they might not all be the same opinions, and that's ok.

We also used question of the day to see what the children's level of understanding was about specific subjects, and the types of traditions that their families engaged in.

The best part of our question of the day is that we would write down the children's answers every day and post them on the wall.  These questions and answers started wonderful conversations with parents.  The parents looked forward to seeing how their child answered the questions every day. Sometimes they were impressed by the child's insight, sometimes they laughed out loud at their comical answers, and sometimes they were completely confused and we had to dig a little deeper to figure out what the child meant.

The most difficult thing about doing a question of the day every single day was coming up with different questions to use. Sometimes we used seasonal questions, sometimes they were related to something that we were investigating as a class, and sometimes they were completely random.

I remember searching for questions online and coming up with one or two at a time, but never more than that, so I put together a giant collection of questions that can be used for question of the day.  This set has 51 weeks worth of questions that you can use with your students, along with really cute recording sheets that you can post your answers on.

You can also make copies of completed recording sheets to put in childrens' portfolios - there are questions that fit a number of social emotional and social studies standards.