I have always favored delaying the reading of novels as long as possible so that there is no struggle for our slower students when they do start novels. There is nothing as defeating as not understanding what you are reading in the novels. Factored into this is that we sometimes are guilty of asking students to read in another language when they have not yet developed the ability to read effectively in their first language.
But if our students do enough stories and readings from stories (Reading Option A is explained in Appendix D later in this book) in the first two years, with lots of readings in interactive whiteboard drawings thrown in, we know what will happen in the upper levels: our students will pick up a chapter book and read it with ease, precisely because they did so many readings based on stories first, since the stories – helped along by the interactive whiteboards – were so interesting to them.