The antidote to going out of bounds, so very easy in PQA, is circling. That’s it. When you are asking questions to your kids while circling think of it like beads on a string where the string is the targeted repeated PQA structure and the beads are the other words. When you say the same structures in every thing you say, keeping your focus on the string and not the beads, you can’t go out of bounds. Remember that you are not teaching the other words, you are teaching the structures. So focus on the structures when circling.
That is for PQA – circling keeps you in bounds in PQA. In stories, the way to stay comprehensible is to circle, obviously, but there is another trick in stories: stick to the script and allow only the variables to change, as described above.
I was doing Jim’s four Halloween structures today, but within ten minutes I felt the absence of a script to take the PQA to the next level. I had learned in the first ten mintues of class that two kids had gone out to get candy last night, but then I didn’t have a place to go, a plot to hang things on, a script to follow.
It’s weird how it happens, because sometimes the PQA launches itself into bizarre scenes all by itself, but sometimes not, which is why it is always nice to do PQA in conjunction with an eventual story. If the PQA wanes, the story is always there, ready to provide back up for the waning PQA.