WH questions come up often in pediatric language therapy! They are really functional and seem to be easily noticed as a weakness by teachers and parents.
I wanted to share some thoughts on targeting World Heritage issues as well as some of my favorite resources for targeting World Heritage issues at different language levels.
My biggest advice and strategy when targeting World Heritage issues is to do so direct and explicit. Include visual elements. Define each WH question for your student. For example, your students need to hear “where means a place” over and over again.
Another important thing to remember when working with a child who has difficulty answering WH questions is that in many cases it is less about the words of the WH question (who, what, where, etc.) and more on the rest of the question.
For example, factors such as the vocabulary words used and whether the question requires inference to be answered make some World Heritage questions much more difficult than others. Even a student’s basic knowledge can have an impact on their ability to answer some World Heritage questions and not others!
If you are writing a WH question objective, make sure the student really has a hard time with the WH questions (not vocabulary, inference, question syntax, etc.). Otherwise, a direct target in this area might be more appropriate.
Having said that, I have seen huge gains in directly targeting World Heritage issues with students at a very wide variety of levels – from preschool to middle school.
Answering WH questions is a functional academic and functional skill for people of all ages!
Here are 5 activities I use all the time to target WH issues in my speech therapy sessions.
These super simple questions + two choices of real picture answers are a great activity for teaching World Heritage questions directly! I also like it for informal evaluation or tracking progress.
Once my students have developed their ability to answer these types of simple questions, I try to move on to other more difficult (and functional) activities like the others in this blog post.
This is one of my favorite formats for working on WH issues! I love that I can easily increase or decrease the level by providing more or less choices of icon responses.
In case you’re more of a digital SLP, I’ve included a version of Boom maps in this resource as well! This is a great way to save time when printing, laminating and preparing!
This resource is similar to the one above, but it is newer and includes different scenes of images as well as color coding!
It is also fully digital and interactive!
Click here to view this resource in my TpT store!
As important as answering World Heritage questions, being able to formulate and ask them is just as, if not * more *, important!
This resource targets the formulation of questions for more information.
He reviews each WH question, one at a time, to support success with your students!
Click here to learn more about this resource!
Once my students are older or at a higher language level, my favorite way to target WH questions is from texts!
To differentiate this activity for different grade levels, I could target storytelling versus non-fiction (stories are usually easier for most students!) Or provide / remove question answer choices.
I also love providing teachers with the same visuals in case they are helpful when doing classroom assignments as well.
All of this is included in my WH Questions resource from short texts which includes visuals, leveled options and 60 unique texts (both narrative and non-fiction). You can read more or see sample pages by click here.
If you’re looking for even more ideas, I have quite a few resources that directly target WH questions in my TpT store. I also have resources on World Heritage issues included in my thematic units!
Hope this gives you some ideas! If you’re looking for even more interesting information on question answers, here are some of my favorite resources to learn more:
- Bloom’s taxonomy
- Other resources like this
- And other things
Thanks for reading!
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