f. After you have established meaning in the way described in the previous article, ask some general questions. Does William work? Circle that exhaustively in the normal way. Use “where” and “with whom” as a springboard question for cute answers. If no cute answers are suggested, after you have circled those first general questions, go to PSA, which allows for far easier personalization than PQA, as per:
https://benslavic.com/blog/pqa-bis/
https://benslavic.com/blog/psa-2/
You will notice, as I said above, that when using PSA as opposed to PQA, things get more personalized in funnier ways faster. Strong humorous personalization can happen in PQA, but it happens faster in PSA. Just pick the right kid, the one who can take a little ribbing. When we state to the class that William works in a strip club (we have one around the corner from our high school so we use that personalized place location a lot) we ramp everything up.
g. Now you have established meaning and gotten a gesture established. (Since you are only teaching one verb in
this suggested fifteen minute new Verb Wall activity to start class every day next year, it is far easier to remember
to gesture it during this fifteen minute period of class, so maybe you can even hope that, with this simple gesturing challenge of only one verb for fifteen minutes, you can finally master the art of gesturing all the time in class as you deliver CI to your students.) You have also done some PQA or PSA with the class to personalize the verb to the group you are working with for greater humor. By now your single baseball pitch counter or PQA counter kid who is counting reps on that single verb will tell you that you have AT LEAST 50 reps. Anyone who knows how difficult it is to teach verbs and has been frustrated by that sees the wisdom of starting class targeting only one verb for fifteen minutes.
