I got this question from a blog member:
I didn’t do Circling with Balls last year because I had NO clue what I was doing when I first started, but it is AWESOME. You get huge student buy-in and connection – the other day I arm-wrestled two jocks (and got my ass handed to me of course) because we were talking about how strong they were, but all the kids were super-involved. I’m curious how long I can sustain the momentum though. Are there any tricks to switching things up once the kids kinda get the drill? And how do you approach the block days – that seems like a long time to circle!?
My response and others are invited to chime in:
1. As we do in stories and as Blaine has taught us, whenever the circling gets too “tight” and we can’t add any more details, we can always bring in a new character or a new event. That opens up a lot that we can articulate via comparison with the new character or via gathering information about the event.
2. We can ask “Where?”. This has been proven to be a very valuable question. Once a silly place has been identified, it is so easy to ask more silly questions.
3. We can just extend the PQA in any of the ways decribed in PQA in a Wink!
4. We can drop the card altogether and go to another kid’s card. We don’t want to leave any kids not discussed by the time we finish the Circling with Balls activity, whenever we choose to do that.
Now, if we just don’t want to continue with the PQA of the cards because a block period is just too long, then we just go to a dictation or do some other bail out move as per these blog posts from a few years ago:
https://benslavic.com/blog/2008/05/10/ways-to-bail-out/
https://benslavic.com/blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=5932&action=edit