How to make reading comprehension questions for any book at home

When the teacher says a kid needs to work on reading comprehension, the advice for parents is usually to ask questions about the book. That's good advice and surprisingly hard to follow. Coming up with decent questions on the spot is tricky, and even more so when you haven't read the book yourself.

A photo of the pages your kid just read solves the "what do I ask" part.

How to do it

1. Let your kid read a chapter, or a couple of pages, as usual.
2. Photograph those pages with SwipeSmrt.
3. Tap Generate Quiz and hand over the phone.

The screenshots above use two pages from a 1916 school reader, a story about a slow little turtle who gets carried off by two boys. One of the questions asked what the turtle does when it's frightened, which is exactly the kind of detail that shows whether the pages were understood or just read.

What kinds of questions help

Teachers tend to group comprehension questions roughly like this:

• What happened: who did what, and in what order.
• Why it happened: what caused a character to act the way they did.
• Words in context: what an unfamiliar word means from the sentence around it.
• What might come next, and why.

A multiple-choice quiz covers the first three well. The last one is better as a conversation, so after the quiz, ask one open question like "what do you think happens to the turtle now?" and let your kid explain.

New words from the book are worth quizzing on their own too. There's more on that in turning a vocabulary list into a quiz.

Tips

• Quiz right after reading, while the story is fresh. Two pages at a time is plenty for younger readers.
• Let your kid read the explanation out loud when an answer is wrong. It sends them back into the text.
• The quiz follows the language of the book, so a Swedish or Spanish chapter book works too. Why that matters for bilingual kids is covered in studying in your strongest language.
• If your kid reads on their own phone or tablet, tap Share with Child and send them the quiz.

Common questions

What age is this for?

It fits kids who read chapter books on their own, roughly from second or third grade and up. For younger kids, read the pages together and do the quiz together too.

Do I need to have read the book?

No. The questions come from the pages you photograph, and every answer comes with an explanation, so you can follow along without knowing the story.

Does it work for books in other languages?

Yes. Photograph a Swedish or Spanish book and the questions come back in that language.

See it in action

Send a quiz to your kid's phone (0:54). Transcript and more videos