Ask About the Picture: Why and How

Four picture tiles run across the top of this 2nd grade page — on the sheet shown a person, a pear, a house and a clock face set to nine o'clock. Beneath them sit six wide sets of handwriting rules, and each one already carries its first word in grey: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. The child finishes every line so that it becomes a question about the pictures. Nothing else is printed, and no answer is expected anywhere on the sheet.

The title names the two starters that are new here. Who, what, where and when have all appeared on earlier faces of the family; why and how have not, because neither can be answered by pointing at a thing, and both need the child to invent a situation rather than read one. That is the open end of the question-word ladder and the reason this page has no right answers — a good why is the one nobody else at the table thought of.

One sheet, six questions. The four tiles are separate pictures rather than one scene, so decide as a class what is happening between them before anyone writes; the why and how lines have very little to work with otherwise. Use it to close a question-words unit, and read the six finished questions aloud — they are usually better than the pictures deserve.