David Maust wrote some stuff here last weekend that just has to be repeated for the good of the order, since many of are doing PQA right now:
I’m feeling a freedom this year to make extremely simple scenes with my Circling with Balls Cards. Last year I think I tried to develop the cards into larger stories that the some of the kids weren’t quite ready for yet and I think I started losing some of them early on. It also took a LONG time to get through all the cards and that wasn’t a problem, but I could tell that some fatigue would set in when I was trying too hard to pull out a story when quite a few kids weren’t ready for that intensity of focus on one story and it wasn’t interesting enough (because I was “pulling” the story out and it wasn’t growing organically from the students cute answers).
So this year I’m trying to rest more on cute answers and just let stories (or scenes) rather end before developing a full blown story and certainly not with 3 locations and too many details yet. So I guess this is a way of saying I’m just “extending PQA.”
Two examples of scenes that developed in my first level classes in the first week and I envision more like these that will: 1. establish the personalities of my kids for the year; 2. norm the class and the rules; 3. give them the experience of acquisition early on and a base of vocabulary to build stories on in a few weeks.
Example 1: This is Ana Johnson. Ana plays basketball. Ana plays basketball in the Staples Center (where the Lakers in LA play). Ana plays basketball with Cthulhu (a 1920s sci-fi sea monster a kid suggested that has been on Southpark and the kids thought was hilarious, esp. in the drawings that the artists made).
Example 2: This is Brian. Brian plays football. Brian plays football in Jack in the Box. Brian plays football better than Tim Tebow. (Note: a kid suggested Jack in the Box and everyone loved it. I suggested Tim Tebow and although they accepted it, it was definitely more awkward and didn’t “feel” like the right answer somehow – hard to explain, but that’s how it felt.)
Example 3: This is Jack. Jack plays the guitar. Jack plays the guitar in a dark alley in Rome (even though “dark alley in Rome” was given in English from the kid, the other students LOVED this cute answer. And the kid was beaming with pride and got a fist bump from me – so of course I took it. It really was THE RIGHT ANSWER because since I teach Latin I have lots of pictures and posters of Rome up and the kid was pointing to those when he said it. We turned the lights out and “entered” the dark alley). Slash (from Guns N’ Roses) is in the dark alley. Jack plays “Crazy Train” better than Slash. Slash is not happy. Jack is happy. (I had actors up for this one and the Slash kid wore a Zoro hat and we practiced synchronizing actions with words.)
So each of these stories took about 20-30 min. to create, had a minimum of vocab and most importantly were totally driven by the cute answers from the kids. I think the story itself not only goes into the subconscious in these early days of class, but also the MEMORY OF WHO SUGGESTED THE ANSWER, and this is huge for getting the kids to buy into “playing the game” for the rest of the year. I didn’t get this early on last year – maybe because I had a flatter class, but probably more likely because I was forcing stories, not keeping things simple enough and not waiting long enough for cute answers; or maybe because I just didn’t move on when a story had obviously lost steam and rather forced it to keep developing when it was already dead.
Thanks, David
I’m feeling a freedom this year to make extremely simple scenes with my Circling with Balls Cards. Last year I think I tried to develop the cards into larger stories that the some of the kids weren’t quite ready for yet and I think I started losing some of them early on. It also took a LONG time to get through all the cards and that wasn’t a problem, but I could tell that some fatigue would set in when I was trying too hard to pull out a story when quite a few kids weren’t ready for that intensity of focus on one story and it wasn’t interesting enough (because I was “pulling” the story out and it wasn’t growing organically from the students cute answers).
So this year I’m trying to rest more on cute answers and just let stories (or scenes) rather end before developing a full blown story and certainly not with 3 locations and too many details yet. So I guess this is a way of saying I’m just “extending PQA.”
Two examples of scenes that developed in my first level classes in the first week and I envision more like these that will: 1. establish the personalities of my kids for the year; 2. norm the class and the rules; 3. give them the experience of acquisition early on and a base of vocabulary to build stories on in a few weeks.
Example 1: This is Ana Johnson. Ana plays basketball. Ana plays basketball in the Staples Center (where the Lakers in LA play). Ana plays basketball with Cthulhu (a 1920s sci-fi sea monster a kid suggested that has been on Southpark and the kids thought was hilarious, esp. in the drawings that the artists made).
Example 2: This is Brian. Brian plays football. Brian plays football in Jack in the Box. Brian plays football better than Tim Tebow. (Note: a kid suggested Jack in the Box and everyone loved it. I suggested Tim Tebow and although they accepted it, it was definitely more awkward and didn’t “feel” like the right answer somehow – hard to explain, but that’s how it felt.)
Example 3: This is Jack. Jack plays the guitar. Jack plays the guitar in a dark alley in Rome (even though “dark alley in Rome” was given in English from the kid, the other students LOVED this cute answer. And the kid was beaming with pride and got a fist bump from me – so of course I took it. It really was THE RIGHT ANSWER because since I teach Latin I have lots of pictures and posters of Rome up and the kid was pointing to those when he said it. We turned the lights out and “entered” the dark alley). Slash (from Guns N’ Roses) is in the dark alley. Jack plays “Crazy Train” better than Slash. Slash is not happy. Jack is happy. (I had actors up for this one and the Slash kid wore a Zoro hat and we practiced synchronizing actions with words.)
So each of these stories took about 20-30 min. to create, had a minimum of vocab and most importantly were totally driven by the cute answers from the kids. I think the story itself not only goes into the subconscious in these early days of class, but also the MEMORY OF WHO SUGGESTED THE ANSWER, and this is huge for getting the kids to buy into “playing the game” for the rest of the year. I didn’t get this early on last year – maybe because I had a flatter class, but probably more likely because I was forcing stories, not keeping things simple enough and not waiting long enough for cute answers; or maybe because I just didn’t move on when a story had obviously lost steam and rather forced it to keep developing when it was already dead.
Thanks, David