To save time, some of us may have tried writing a composite reading of all our classes and asking the classes to read them. It doesn’t work. It is best to take the extra time and rewrite each story. We only have to do it once a week at most. The big problem is that the classes don’t have command of the specific vocabulary from the story that the other class created. More importantly, they don’t want to know. Classes have fierce pride of ownership in their stories, something we have seen in the class competitions idea (there is a category for that), which has the potential to be a major player in getting classes more involved in stories in the future. They know their own story, they can read it, they like it, and they don’t want to read another class story, and they especially don’t want to see their own story watered down.
I’m bringing this up because here in the middle of the year many of us are moving into stories and will be using Reading Option A a lot through the winter. I’m not saying that, if we are pressed for time, we shouldn’t try to do a generic reading for all our classes, just that, having tried it for over ten years and never being happy with it, I have decided to bite the bullet and write individual readings from notes provided for me by my superstar story writer in each class. It just makes for a better Reading Option A experience when each story is personalized to that class. It’s just my own preference and opinion, definitely, and I remind the group that there never will be any one way to do any of this work.