The Guide to Creative Questioning series (originally published under the title Suppose the Wolf Were an Octopus) is an essential resource for parents and instructors of students in kindergarten through the eighth grade. Based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, it is designed to develop critical and creative thinking in children and teens through primary-, elementary-, and middle-grade literature.

Most reading programs follow a standard format: the students read a literary work, and the instructor asks questions about specific characters or plot points in the book to ensure that the students actually read and understood the work. But when the questioning stops there, it does a disservice both to the students and to the literature itself.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework of educational objectives arranged in progression from the lower-order thinking skills of remembering, understanding, and applying knowledge to the higher-order skills of analyzing, evaluating, and creating. The books in this series apply that framework to classic and beloved literary works from children’s and young adult literature, providing questions that prompt thinking at each of the levels so that students are not only delving more deeply into the literature but also stretching their understanding, exercising their critical and creative thinking skills, and building high-level cognitive abilities that will translate to other topics and subjects—and not just academic ones.

Each book in the series explores the rationale for creative questioning in the teaching of literature, with an overview of Bloom’s Taxonomy. But the heart of the books is an extensive catalog of selections from children’s and young adult literature. Each selection is listed by title and author and contains a brief synopsis of the story, followed by sets of questions based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, with a few questions at each level—all designed to enable students to exercise the full range of thinking skills, from simple to complex.*

The series provides information and creative questions for parents and instructors who:

• Want to promote deep reading in their students, as well as thoughtful consideration of the works read
• Wish to engage their students in meaningful discussions
• Might not be familiar with a literary work and find reassurance through the questions that it is indeed a piece to be included in literature study

This series enables instructors to save countless hours of lesson preparation. More significantly, however, it gives children and teens opportunities to develop and strengthen valuable higher-order thinking skills that will benefit them for a lifetime.

*Please note that the literary works themselves are not included in the books in this series.