Games to improve elementary students' questioning skills include "20 questions" and "Yes and No." With "20 questions," one student chooses a famous person to be and then the rest of the class tries to guess who it is. The famous person can only answer yes or no. With the "Yes and No" game, students play in pairs. One asks the other questions, such as "do you have brown hair?" and the other tries to answer without saying yes or no.
Teachers can build up the students' questioning skills by encouraging them to ask relevant questions about a text. For example, using a popular children's story, such as "The Three Little Pigs," the teacher asks questions out loud about the book cover. The questions can be as simple as "how many pigs are there?" and "where do you think they live?" As the teacher reads the book, he can ask questions as the story evolves. The teacher can then encourage students to ask questions about what happens after the story ends.
Children enjoy play-acting so give them some scenes to enact that involve questions. For instance, two students can do a role-play of a mother who has found out that there is cereal all over the kitchen floor. One student plays the mother and the other student plays the child. If the children are confident, allow them to improvise, but if not, ask them to write their questions down before acting out the scene. Get the student to swap roles so that each has an opportunity to ask and answer questions.
Use an interactive white board to practice question words, such as what, why, when, who, where. Project the question words on to the board and ask volunteers to come to the board and write questions. Teachers can tie this in to an existing project. For instance, if the students are learning about the Aztecs, the teacher can encourage students to devise a series of questions, using all the main question words. Another use of the white board is to get the class to compile a list of questions to ask an alien who has landed on Earth. Ask for volunteers to write the questions, with help from the teacher, on the board.