T atty: Learning about the WH questions gives Tully focus something to listen out for and a way to organize his thinking. His tutor uses the puppets when he reviews Chumash with him.

Rebbi: I saw gradual improvement as Tully mastered the WH questions. To reinforce this skill I direct WH questions to him in class based on the material we’re learning.

Tully: Now when my rebbi or friends talk to me I try to answer the WH questions in my head. I even earned a prize from rebbi today for knowing the answer!

When Tully arrives for his next session I show him our puppet theater.

“Imagine you’re at a play ” I tell Tully “but the lights are off and you can’t see a thing. All you hear are the actors’ voices. Would you understand what was going on?” Tully shakes his head.

“That’s right.” I open the curtains. “We need the scenery and props to tell us where the story is happening and when it’s taking place. We need to see the actors to know what they’re doing and who everyone is.” I pull out four puppets. “Anytime you hear a story you need to focus on these four things: Who What When and Where.”

The ability to answer the WH questions is one of the most basic skills for decoding language.

As I label each “WH question ” I hand Tully a puppet. The Who puppet has a smiley icon to indicate a person the What puppet has a hand icon to indicate action the Where puppet has a house icon to indicate place and the When icon shows a clock to indicate time.

We begin with Who.

We start with “who” since it’s almost always the easiest question to answer.

Back at my desk I show Tully a large picture. (To keep things interesting I use humorous pictures or pictures of things likely to be of interest to Tully.) Tully brings the Who puppet to the picture and practices identifying the “who” in each photo. As he progresses over several sessions he can eventually answer all four WH questions to form a complete sentence: “This is a man [who] in the park [where] in the morning [when] walking with a cane made out of Lego [what].”

With time Tully progresses to performing this exercise with written sentences. I hand Tully a stack of pages depicting an empty stage. The first page reads “At six o’clock the boy sat down on the floor and took off his shoes.”

“Can you draw the scene on the stage?”

Tully looks stuck. This is still too hard for him. I modify the sentence so it reads “Tully sat on the floor and took off his shoes.” Now Tully can act it out. After practicing he progresses to drawing the scene in each sentence carefully incorporating each WH. The next step is to skip the visual aid. Using highlighters that correspond to the colors of each WH puppet he identifies the who what when and where in each sentence. As we work we address related concepts: pronouns relate to Who verbs relate to What and the concepts of time and calendars relate to When.

Once Tully can decode pronouns and grasp concepts of time he’ll have better tools to process the information he is learning.

As the sessions progress I encourage Tully not only to answer the questions but also to ask.

Kids who ask become active thinkers listeners and learners.

We know Tully has mastered this skill when he can answer the WH questions on information presented not only visually or in writing but verbally!

D. Himy M.S. CCC-SLP is a speech-language pathologist in private practice for over 15 years.