QAR Strategy and CCSS Literacy

As I became familiar with the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts, I immediately saw the correlation with the QAR (Question Answer Relationship) Strategy.  The versatility of the QAR strategy is that it can be incorporated with any type of textual passage and it works across all content areas.  QAR identifies categories of details from the text which are "right there on the page", inferred from passages in different locations within the text, and inferred from the text as a whole.  The best part is it requires students to examine the text as a whole, determining what types of information are explicitly found in the text, what information is learned from multiple locations within a text, versus that information is dependent on their own knowledge base and skills of making inferences.

I have been working with some junior high teachers in Social Studies and I have created edited versions of some of the exemplar texts (Common Core Text Exemplars can be found in Appendix B) to teach students the types of information used in the QAR strategy by requiring groups of students to develop questions from each type.  Hit my TPT button on the right and download my free QAR Lesson Plan and Anchor Chart packet which includes a 5E lesson plan and the patterns for a QAR anchor chart.  When asking groups of students to create questions from each QAR category, you can use index cards or the easy QAR Sticky Note page that you can download here . 

 

 

Directions:

1. Print 2 copies of the QAR Sticky Note page to start.
2. Copy 1 - Place a sticky note within the outline of each of the four boxes on the page. Place the page in the printer.  Make sure the page is oriented in the printer so the sticky part goes in first.
3. Copy 2 - Place this copy of the QAR Sticky Note on the glass of the printer.
4. If you like how it prints, repeat steps 1-3.  Make as many copies of the QAR Sticky Note page as you have students or make one sheet of sticky notes for each group

 

 

As an assessment piece, I created a 4-door foldable for QAR with the question stems.  You can download it here.