This post from 2008 is from my book PQA in a Wink! It offers a way to deal with troubled kids that is based in kindness: Mildred is the captain of the girl’s basketball team. She is rough. She had to be rough because she was thrown around physically by her abusive parents in a […]
Maybe God wants more of Her humanity in our classrooms, and that is why we do PQA, and try, as best we can, to talk to the kids about themselves. It doesn’t matter how bad or embarrassing it is for us. We try anyway, because it is finally time for that – we have reached
This post is from 2009 and describes a middle school class with my then 8th graders. I enjoyed re-reading it, and so am posting it here to share with the group: Today was the first day of a new trimester and for some reason six kids were absent in one class. I had only twenty-two
Sometimes I blend structures from Anne’s stories. Like I took se sent comme/feels like from Wendy Goes To A Psychiatrist and took seul/lonely from Lene and pulled mignon/cute from the text of Lene (Anne had not targeted it but I wanted my kids to know it) so my new structures were feels lonely and cute and, combining the two
If we need a lot of reps on the three structures before leaving the PQA and starting in with the story, then what happens when we do PQA for, like, 30 minutes and then we are stuck with only fifteen or so for the story, not to mention the quick quiz? Should we just stay
What if we can do PQA, but we don’t feel comfortable getting a story going? That’s easy. All we have to do is start circling the first sentence of our script (see the sample stories in TPRS in a Year! for how to do that), establish the problem, and get the actor up and going
In the post below, Bryce addresses the spontaneous creation of CI as opposed to the standard option that we always have in the three steps. It’s the old question of whether to do stay close to the safety of stories or just roam free with one word images and PQA and the like. Everybody has
PQA is great, but, originally, as I understand it, Blaine used it as a way of etching in, drilling in, the three structures prior to the story so that the story could be more easily understood. I wrote in a recent blog on how that particular process differs from what we have come to know
I got this from Carol in New Jersey. She is asking for feedback from everyone. Could you put this out there? Circling and PQA-ing with the purchased materials is falling flat for me. Does someone who is using materials by Blaine or Carol have some advice? Example: circling and PQA-ing il coupe/he cuts and les
Q. What do you tell the students that they are doing the questionnaires for? A. I tell them that I need information to talk about in class because I think that school is boring and that, to make my own job interesting, I would want to talk about the most interesting thing that I can
Q. I wonder how you circle the name they wish to have, how you fish for more information behind it. Could you explain a bit or perhaps give a short script to make clear what exactly might go on starting from those names on the questionnaire? A. I don’t fish for more information about the
Q. Do you keep these questionnaires filed near the front of the class, so you can scan through them and incorporate them into stories? A. This is a very important question. I look at no more than four students’ questionnaires at a time before a regular class. Reviewing their content for at least a few minutes before
