Book 'Em

Today I was teaching a lesson about, when answering questions about a piece of text, how to refer to that text in your answers. 

For example, a question might say, "Name one living thing found in the desert ecosystem."

Instead of making answers up, I would like students to refer to the information found in the provided text.

We practiced using sentence frames such as:

"On page ___, the author states _____."

Or

"On page ___, paragraph ___, the text says ___________."  

After much group practice, I gave them a question directly from their science text to work on with a partner. 

But first, I checked if anyone had any questions. 

And question number one was:

Can we use our books?

<sigh>