I have been playing around with presenting the structures for a story embedded in a short dictation. I start the class with an easy and loosely constructed, roughly three sentence dictation with the target structures in them. It seems to bring a bit more focus to the presenting of the structures than just listing them, maybe because the kids are writing them out.
Only people who are on time can get the dictation paper (three line groupings on colored paper), and just doing the dictation gets the kids a quiz grade – all they have to do is copy properly for a 10/10 on the quiz.
This is very valuable for getting kids into the classroom on time, especially first period, as we discussed here a few months ago. I definitely don’t give a dictation paper to a kid who is even ten seconds late. It works.
I don’t know if I will continue to introduce stories with a dictation, but it is working now, mainly because dictation, which must be done in silence all the way through, really focuses the room on the structures, as I mentioned above. Then I just go into PQA after the dictation.
Sometimes, to save time during the story day, I will give the dictation the day before. See resources page of this site, click on workshop handouts for instructions on how to do dictation, or at least the way I did them when I was over in France.