Brian wrote:
If you use, say Anne Matava’s scripts for stories, then you aren’t backward planning for the readers/novels – is that right? If that is the case, is it better then to just do some backward planning and work out my own bare bones script from there? How do you do it? My guess is you don’t worry so much about that type of thing, right? I am guessing that as long as you are getting good CI, then even if you aren’t backward planning, so be it. Just PQA when you get to the unfamiliar structures on reading day?
Here is my rather unorthodox answer:
My goal is to simplify my life this year. In terms of backwards planning, either I believe Krashen’s net theory – that my students will learn words by hearing them randomly and aquiring some and not acquiring others, or they won’t. My personal experience over the years is that there is little difference in my students’ gains when I backwards plan on novels, so why do it?
Backwards planning is great when we target the three structures out of stories by doing PQA – that is all that PQA is, a form of backwards planning. But to pull words from a novel, why do it?
The biggest bang for the buck on reading is always from stories anyway, in my opinion. I hope to have that videotape that I worked on with Diana this weekend up here soon and there are a lot of reading clips and I just feel the power of those classes – I think that pound for pound on the return gained, explicating reading, talking about grammar, spinning a bit inot auditory CI from the reading, is the best thing we can be doing in a CI class.
Reading – Step 3 – is not an afterthought. The PQA and the creation of the story (the auditory CI) serve and set up the reading (the visual CI). Laurie nails it when she advocates embedded readings based on stories. My first level of embedding is at 30% and time prevents me from doing the kind of deeper embedding that Laurie does.
So, of the two ways that we deliver CI to kids in the form of reading – creating readings from stories or doing the Susan Gross megthos of just plowing throuigh a novel over a two week period, I will do both. But I won’t backwards plan from a novel anymore. Except for Pobre Ana and the other simple (PA consists of only 300 words) novels out there, there are just too many words to do backwards planning from!
Songs represent a different story – I don’t mind backwards planning from a song. Or a poem.
The key to the whole thing is that we choose novels and songs and poems that are about at the level our kids are. That’s enough backwards planning for me.
Hope this makes sense.