We will need some variety as we get into the next few months and on into the rest of the year. Of course, we already have and use:
- dictée
- CWB
- OWI
- WCTA
- free writes
- etc.
However, we should not forget that some of the things in that list, which are normally associated with beginning the year PQA activities, can also be used as launching pads for stories. Anything, just one word, can become a story.
Of course, building a story without targeted structures is less stable teaching – when we have no targeted structures, which are really guide words for the story, we have less ability to stay in bounds, but if we can keep things comprehensible, it doesn’t matter.
Some of our best work is done in this way, usually in the beginning of the year, so there is no reason to do it all year to bring variety and higher levels of personalization than stories bring into our teaching at this time of year if it is needed.
Any extended PQA or story that comes from the Questionnaires combined with the CWB cards , for example, no matter how simple, will be interesting bc it is so highly personalized. I think Anne is still doing this and just now starting stories – Anne correct me if I am wrong on that.
And by the way, Anne, which come first, the cards or the questionnaires, when you start the year? Do you work from the cards and then bring in stuff from the questionnaires into class or is it the other way around? And are you still doing that now in November? Does doing that generate stories in your classroom? Have you done any stories yet, and what have they looked like, and skip same question.
Another idea to bring variety into our classrooms at this time of year is to take the WCTA and use it as a PQA activity for a story. So, instead of pulling words from the wall to make up word chunks for the game, and instead of PQAing the structures in the normal way, we can make up word chunks from the target structues and play the game to get in the necessary reps to set up the story. It’s another way of doing PQA to set up a story.
[Note: I’m taking the weekend off as per the decision that skip and I have made to rest on the weekends. Go back and read. There are over 3 thousand articles here with 16,000 comments so there is plenty to read. Go into the archives on the right (scroll down) to see articles dating back to 2007, which, interestingly, show few changes in the overall concepts we have been discussing here over the years.]