In Los Alamitos we didn’t have books because we were all French teachers. We didn’t have books (Isabella by Karen Rowan) on Friday either.
But we should have. The point was to teach reading. At one point I was so captivated by Bryce’s acting with Annemarie (and the mom voice and the Mark Mallaney voice) and all of that, that I soon forgot it was a reading class.
So I found a break in the fun to ask Jason if this wasn’t just a good story and weren’t we really in Step 2 now and he looked shocked and said:
“They have the books!”
and gave the above criteria for assessment which is where Annemarie probably scribbled them down (thank you!) so that we could know that what we were seeing was all about reading.
The students have the books and we are constantly checking to see if their fingers are on the words, if they are on the correct page, asking all sorts of questions about the story, doing the cloze call and repeat thing (it’s bad ass), and we are looking in their eyes.