Questions Worth Asking a Story

Get Ready

Some questions have one answer and stop. Others open the story up. Learn to tell them apart.

Today’s story

The Last Day of the Pool

A story about a swimming pool closing. About 230 words.

Words to know

retrieval questionA question you answer by pointing at a word in the story.
shallow endThe part of a pool where the water is not deep.
valveA part you turn to let water flow out or to stop it.

Read and Answer

Read one page. Then answer the question in the yellow box.

Page 1 of 3

The Corn Street Pool opened in 1908 and closed on a Tuesday in August. For the last hour, anybody could swim for free. There were more people in the water that afternoon than there had been on any day Idris could remember. He had been coming since he was four.

The tiles around the shallow end had turned the color of weak tea after a hundred and sixteen years of water. The corners nobody could reach with a brush were green. Long bars of light fell from the high windows across the water. The noise bounced off the roof the way it always had. Everybody sounded like they were shouting from farther away than they really were.

At four o’clock, the lifeguard blew the whistle, and everybody got out. Nobody argued about it.

What makes the second question better?

Page 2 of 3

They opened the valve at 4:30. Idris sat on the edge, feet in, and watched the water drop past one tile, then another, until he could not feel it.

The deep end went last. It took almost an hour, and by the end, fourteen people were left, standing at the rail and not talking much.

Underneath, where the water had been, there was a drain, a lost pair of goggles, and a penny.

Page 3 of 3

Somebody said it was a shame. Somebody else said the roof had needed fixing for years.

Idris walked home the long way.

Read It All

Answer all the questions to open the whole story.

My Notebook

Finish the story first. Then write two things you noticed.

What You Learned

A retrieval question has one answer and stops there.
Why and how questions about the writer open a story.
A question you cannot answer at once is often the good one.

For the grown-up

Children generate retrieval questions because that is what they are asked. The distinction worth teaching is between a question answered by pointing and a question about the writer’s choices, and the tell is whether you can answer it immediately.

When your child asks a question about a book, ask whether they could answer it by pointing at a word.