When my youngest daughter was five years old, I read her Miss Nelson Is Back by Harry Allard and James Marshall. As you may know, Miss Nelson is a sweet, kind teacher whose class on occasion gets a little rowdy. When the class gets rowdy, Miss Nelson often disappears for a few days and Miss Viola Swamp, the substitute teacher from Hell takes over the class. A few days of Miss Swamp and the children are eager for Miss Nelson to return. At the end of this book, Viola Swamp steps out of the classroom and into the hall, never to be seen again. A minute after Viola Swamp leaves, Miss Nelson returns. There are plenty of clues in the book that suggest that Viola Swamp is really Miss Nelson in disguise, but to make that connection the reader has to attend to those clues in order to fill that gap in the text. When I asked my daughter what had happened to Viola Swamp, she replied that Viola Swamp went to another part of the school and put kids into cages. It was a bizarre response I thought. But when I asked her why she thought that, she replied that the story had said that Viola Swamp was "a real witch." Then I remembered my daughter knew from "Hansel and Gretel" that witches put children into cages. My daughter had attended to one of the signs, "witches," differently than most readers, and then used that to fill in the gap about what had happened to Viola Swamp in a most creative manner, though still a manner that was supported by her understanding of the text. As she gained more experience with stories in general and with that story in particular, she began to notice some of the other clues and she filled in that gap differently. My role wasn't to tell her she was wrong, but was to acknowledge the intellectual achievement in her connection. In future readings I could call her attention to other clues and ask her what she thought those might mean.

-- abstracted from Hade, Daniel D. (1991). Being literary in a literature-based classroom. Children's Literature in Education, 22:1-17.