Class reading of Les Aventures d'Isabelle

OMG!  I decided to read Les Aventures together with my level 2 kids (yes, easy, but a great way to make everyone feel confident...especially since my kids come to me from 3 different French 1 teachers and we're trying to get on the same page) this week.

I only have 5 copies of the book right now, so I used a document camera to project the pages.  I wasn't quite sure where I was going to go with this simple chapter, and the magic happened!  I really focused on questioning the students about every sentence or two.  Here are some of the questions I asked, based on the first chapter of the book:

1. How old was Isabelle's mom when she had her?
2. Do you think that's young to have a baby?
3. What is the perfect age to have a baby?
4. Am I, at 38, too old to have a baby?
5. Would you like to have a baby at 17?
6. If her mom is brunette with brown eyes, what do you think her dad looks like?
7. (and here, someone suggested she might have been adopted) Could her mom have adopted her at 20? (then, someone suggested she could have adopted her as an older child when she was older or Isabelle could have been kidnapped.)
8. Do any of you have a parent who travels a lot for work?
9. Who the heck still uses a real camera?
10. Who wants to be famous?
11. Do famous vets exist?
12. How about famous dancers? (then we named some)
13. Can you be a famous dancer and then be president?

The higher-order thinking was off the hook and when we finished the chapter in my afternoon class, a student said "Can we keep reading that book?  It was really fun." 

I have to admit that I honestly thought that teachers who quoted their students saying similar things in the past lived in a utopia where every student is the child of a college professor or something.  Now that it's happening in my class, I'm astounded!