Join literacy consultant Debra Crouch as she shares a big book with a San Diego Kindergarten class. This introductory session focuses on meaning and cognition of Which Pet is Best? Watch how Debra models her thinking about how the book works. Most conversation happens as whole-group discussion, until the turn-and-talk at the end of the book.

This follow-up reading's focus is about deepening meaning of the book. Debra again models her thinking and invites students to turn-and-talk several times during their second reading of Which Pet is Best? Students join in reading the text aloud with the teacher as they choose. Debra uses a pointer to track the print by moving fluidly under the text, as all students in the class have one-to-one [...]

In this installment with Debra Crouch, she and her students revisit the text to focus on vocabulary —specifically, describing words. Students discuss numerous describing words in the book. With each word discussed, Debra reads the sentence on the page to establish meaning, discusses meaning of the vocabulary word, and then rereads the sentence to put the word back into context. Students join in reading the text aloud with her [...]

Before the video begins, Debra had students draw and write a response to the book: write about a pet you think is best. After collecting the students’ writing, Debra examined their writing to determine an appropriate teaching focus for word study. Debra determined that the word study focus would be to encourage students to ask themselves, “Does the word look right?” after they write a word. [...]

This modeled writing experience gives children an opportunity to hear a writer decide what to write about, how to say the ideas to be written, and to notice strategies and conventions for getting an idea onto paper. Literacy consultant Debra Crouch writes about a topic the students had already written about: the best pet. After discussing the topic with students, Debra discusses different ways to begin [...]

This lesson happened just before the first reading of Which Pet is Best? The book had been used in several reading sessions the previous week. In this session, several pages, not the entire book, are used as a warm-up at the beginning of shared reading time to extend oral language. Students join in the reading as they choose. The language focus is on continuing to use positional words. [...]

SMALL GROUP READING TO EXTEND ORAL LANGUAGE Watch as the teacher leads a reading lesson with a small group of kindergarten children. The teacher invites each child to look at the pictures in the book and asks the child open questions about the story. Most of all, the teacher prompts the child to use their own words. She also asks the children questions starting with "which" [...]