Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions are wonderful tools that promote children's creative thought, problem-solving skills, and cognitive growth. Use open-ended questions, such as those below, often and in multiple areas of the curriculum.

• What do you think about ...?

• What could you do about it?

• How could we fix it?

• I wonder if there's another way?

• What's your opinion?

• Just suppose that...then what?

• What would happen if ...?

• What else can we use this for?

• What is this like?

• Is there another way to do this?

• What if we added this?

• What if we take this away?

• Why do you think this happened?

• How do you think this works?

• How did you ... ?

• How could you ... ?

• How else could you do that?

• What's similar about these?

• In what ways are these different?

• What could you tell me about?

• What did you notice about ...?

• How do you think we could ...?

• Tell me about it.