David Talone asks a great question we can all benefit from:
I was wondering if you would mind either starting a new thread or bumping one up on ideas to do at Parents Night. I have two parents nights (one middle, one high school) in the coming week. I only have ten minutes with the parents and many will arrive late as it is. My thoughts are that this is too short a time to really model PQA or a story. I saw the idea to do the 3 ring circus, but honestly I still don’t even feel comfortable doing that with the kids.
I had a couple of thoughts/ideas that I would love to hear comments on.
1) Show a 30 second video of me working PQA with the kids – to show the fact that the kids are listening to, understanding and responding to target language. That would be even cooler with subtitles, but perhaps I am being idealistic here. (to be clear, I would just record myself, no kids in the frame, with them responding off camera).
2) Share a copy of one of each student’s freewrites with each set of parents.
3) Have an audio recording of a star student who is willing to – retell one of the mini-PQA stories we have worked in class, and have a text in English for the parents to see.
4) Explain the idea of comprehensible input, and grading using the ACTFL modes of communication.
I would really love to hear more ideas because these are just the things that occur to me off the top of my head, having never done a parents night while using TPRS and CI.
My response is that David has two this week so let’s throw some idea/comments at him and for the good of all of us. My own thing is that I try to give the parents what they really want, a feeling of the play involved in CI. So I do a little Circling with Balls with them. They love it. They don’t care like we do about methods so I avoid that discussion. We don’t yet have a category on this so perhaps we can start one here with this thread.