QAR Lesson




 During today's lesson, students engaged with the books "Rolling Along: The story of Taylor and his Wheelchair", and "All About Adoption: How Families Are Made & How Kids Feel About It", exploring themes of family, inclusion, identity, resilience, and empathy. Miss Julia and I read the book aloud to the students, and then had them each fill out a Question, Answer, Relationship sheet (QAR). We then had the students draw their own families on a colored piece of paper. 









The students were encouraged to connect personally to themes around family, belonging, and overcoming challenges, while also participating in meaningful conversation that demonstrated understanding and compassion.

The read-aloud and guided discussion engaged students, and many were eager to share personal connections. The QAR activity supported comprehension by helping students recognize different ways to find answers, and students responded positively to having sentence starters and visual supports. The students also responded well to having white boards in front of them to write down any questions they had during the story to hold onto for after, this way we didn't have to keep stoping mid story to answer questions. 

One area for growth would involve pacing. The discussions went well and were very meaningful, however they took more time than anticipated, and a few students needed additional support staying focused during certain tasks and transitions. One students also required more modeling for how to answer certain questions. The students all identified themes of belonging and inclusion and demonstrated their understanding through the discussions and drawings they did. Students who received Tier 2 and Tier 3 supports benefited from the visuals, and sentence starters we provided for them. Providing the students with vocabulary words and their definitions also seemed to help them better understand each story and be able to discuss more in depth. 

This lesson helped show how important it is to create a safe space for students to examine identity, family, and ability in thoughtful ways. Having literacy instruction and social-emotional learning helped support deeper understandings of characters and real-world issues. It also demonstrated how academic and SEL goals can work together to help support students learning. When the students were provided with guided frameworks like QAR, sentence starters, vocabulary, and modeled language, they were excited to share more and discuss the story in a deeper way than before. The students were eager to share differences and similarities about the stories and be able to connect it to themselves sharing personal reflections during the discussions and through their drawing.

Texts Read:

  • Rolling Along: The Story of Taylor and His Wheelchair
  • All About Adoption: How Families Are Made & How Kids Feel About It


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