Charlotte Armajo

I really liked this book for guided reading for older ELL students and with younger students. I used this book with my ELL student in 6th grade for guided reading and it was a perfect book for encouraging students to use total physical response to demonstrate how the animals are dancing. I used prompting questions to ask my student "show me how this animal danced" and "what is your favorite animal and how do you think it would dance?" It was very open ended in letting questions flow and letting the student think differently about what was happening in the book. I think this book is also good for introducing students to repetition and a sing-song pace when reading. I really liked this book and would definitely use it with a variety of readers.… (mehr)

I gave this book a 5/5 star review because it is very versatile for teachers or students to use. This book was about different desert animals dancing. I like how teachers can use this as a pattern book or as a guided reading book. In addition, the pictures show exactly what the text is saying, so each page isn't too busy. For example, "Lizard started to thump his tail, thump his tail, thump his tail." The picture shows the lizard up close, thumping his tail and the only other objects in the picture are of cacti, the desert and the moon. Teachers or students can also make the sounds as they read, 'thump thump thump."… (mehr)