It is always interesting for the pupils and teachers if visitors can be brought into school to talk about some aspect of the curriculum as it often increases the enthusiasm for the subject and is good for the pupils to be able to ask questions. Some schools regularly invite authors to talk about their books and the process of writing or they ask someone to talk about their own experiences of life in the past. The teacher’s role is to prepare the children beforehand so they know a bit about the visitor and that they have thought about any questions they might want to ask.

Any teacher knows that children, especially young children, can be unpredictable in the type of questions that they ask so to prevent the visitor being asked random questions such as,” Do you like tigers?” when they have come to talk about working as a paramedic vetting the questions is important.

If the pupils are asked to write down the question they would like answered it gives the teacher chance to prevent the children asking the same question multiple times and to weed out the irrelevant ones. The children could then vote on the selection of questions they are going to ask and choose a few children to pose the questions to the visitor.