What it is. Writers pick one exact word where an ordinary one would do, and you can borrow it.
Why our test works. Asking WHY a word was chosen turns reading into writing. It is also the literary counterweight to the academic strand running in the same weeks — those words are for reports, these are for stories, and a child needs to know they are different tools.
Leans on. Grade 2's Poodle work.
Watch for. Never ask what happened. Ask what the WRITER did.
Find the one word on the page the author chose carefully — not the longest, the most exact — and use it in a sentence of your own. Using Poodle and the Art of the Comma. The worked example is the one you build on the board: Teacher reads the page from Poodle and the Art of the Comma aloud with the book open, then The class reads the teaching page printed at the top of the sheet — our own writing, so a child who was absent can still get the lesson.
You open by saying where this sits — what it follows and what it is part of — in one sentence, and then you give them the reason it matters, in your own words, for about ten seconds. Before anything new, sixty seconds of retrieval on U1 set 2, U1 set 3: ask, take the answers from boards rather than hands so you see all thirty, and do not re-teach — note who has lost it and carry on.
Then you do one yourself, building it on the board and leaving it up: Teacher reads the page from Poodle and the Art of the Comma aloud with the book open, then models the move on one sentence from it. The board copy is what they look back at when they stall, so it stays there for the whole lesson.
The We-do is the main whiteboard moment of the lesson — short answers, boards up on your signal, every child visible at once. Class does the same move together on a second sentence, checking against the author's own. If the answer is a whole sentence rather than a word, take it on the printed sheet instead, because a sentence written on a whiteboard is written once and destroyed.
They read the teaching page — printed at the top of today's sheet — with you, either read-aloud or FASE, never round robin. Stop at the worked example and let them look at it.
Exit directions in full, standing still, before anyone moves. Then they work alone: A word worth stealing — on the sheet, using the page we just read.
You close on the exit direction — Read out your sentence from Poodle and the Art of the Comma. — taken from every child before anyone stands, and then the line you want them to still have tomorrow: Take the word the author chose.
Never ask what happened. Ask what the WRITER did.