vPQA1 – Isabelle 1, 2 and 3 (entire book)

6 thoughts on “vPQA1 – Isabelle 1, 2 and 3 (entire book)”

1. chill

   July 8, 2015 at 9:13 pm

   This is enough material for a marking period!! Great images. Merci.

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2. Ruth

   July 9, 2015 at 5:21 am

   Hi Bryan,
   Thanks for sharing your work. These must have taken a good chunk of time to create! Yes, great images.
   I don’t know this book, but it looks good for beginners.
   I would love to know how you are planning to use these PP presentations.
   Each presentation includes lots of language, both input and output. They aren’t really vPQA according to Ben’s guidelines, but maybe that’s not what you had in mind. There are other ways to use slides, too.
   Could you describe a bit about your plans? How long would you spend on each slide? Are you planning on using these for a whole marking period as Chill said?
   How familiar would your students already be with some of this language? Are the slides supporting what they are familiar with or are they introducing new language?
   Thanks!

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3. Ben Slavic

   July 9, 2015 at 1:05 pm

   I am in full agreement here Ruth, having looked more closely at the slides. I like what Byran did, which is eminently usable in any TPRS classroom, but the slide shows for Isabelle don’t strictly follow vPQA as we have defined it here this year. As such, and thanks to Bryan, this becomes a most important conversation in our vPQA thread.
   Bryan please allow us to be blunt here because so much depends on open communication, as I am sure you agree. So I see now specifically that these slides have too much language in them and not much repetition or scaffolding. THey aren’t really vPQA presentations according to Julie’s guidelines.
   This is such a critical point – trying to deliver too much too fast – that had you not drawn our attention to it, to the importance of scaffolding and image design sequence as set out by Julie, we would not have this example which may be the most important vPQA discussion of all as we get ready to try it out in our classrooms next year.
   Teachers interested in using vPQA next year, in fact, may wonder to what degree I am going to push the vPQA guidelines that I observed in Julie’s classroom. I should say to an extreme degree. Otherwise it’s just a slide show and not of the quality I saw in Julie’s classroom last year, which was markedly different from the use of slides I saw in other Denver Public Schools classrooms.
   Not to say an accomplished teacher couldn’t make these slides work, of course they could, but I am sure that with Bryan’s kind understanding and indulgence, we can use them to point out how vPQA really does follow very precise and carefully designed guidelines, those expressed in the link below and in many other posts on the topic that can be found in the vPQA and Haiku Deck categories.
   https://benslavic.com/blog/36835/

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4. Bryan Whitney

   July 9, 2015 at 5:54 pm

   No worries here! I made these before really knowing the full visual PQA process. These slides are meant more to be a menu of different options. Normally I would only work with a few each class, because yes, there is far too much to try to go through everything. But, I like to have different options for flexibility.
   I see this as more of a starting off point. The vocabulary should either already be familiar to the students or will have to be pre-taught. More work will need to be done to make it compliant with the full visual PQA process.
   I envision using this over an extended period of time, for sure! I actually spent about eight weeks on the “Les Aventures d’Isabelle” book with my French 1 classes this spring.
   I certainly take no offense at any critique. I believe that we’re all here to help each other out, and it is a process for all of us. Steady improvement is my focus, rather than expecting everything to be perfect.

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   1. Ruth

      August 15, 2015 at 4:30 pm

      Hi Bryan,
      How did your students like this story? How did it go as a class book? I’m thinking about ordering some copies and a recommendation would help me decide. How does it compare to Brandon Brown veut un chien as far as difficulty and engagement? Whatever you have to say about it would be useful. Thanks!

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5. Ben Slavic

   July 9, 2015 at 6:32 pm

   That is a stellar response Bryan and very much appreciated. And we should add that such “starting point” slide collections do have within them all sorts of directions for all of us to go in. I love the depth of it and, reflecting what chill said and how you spent eight weeks on what is one of the simplest of all chapter books and really well done by Karen, we should all know that with the available edit functions, there is literally no limit to how we can personalize such slide shows to our own teaching styles. We have so many options in this work it is becoming ridiculous, in a wonderful way, and my own problem years ago of “What do I do today?” has now been replaced by “What don’t I do today?” I’m sure I will make much use of this slide show next year. Wider contributions like yours, and other more strictly done vPQA HD shows, have in them the potential to reduce prep time next year by literally hundreds of hours, and we’ve barely gotten started, as per:
   https://benslavic.com/blog/make-a-deck/
   (Remember that Haiku Deck works off of Chrome and Safari, but not Explorer. Please take a minute to see what we already have, what targets are addressed and maybe think about this year contributing one deck per person. The resulting collection of decks would be one of the greatest aspects of this entire PLC, and, as mentioned, save us tons of prep time next year. I love the discussion here, but I love even more being able to plan lessons just by clicking on a category. I love the strategies we have here the most. They, those strategies, take the worry out of teaching, in a hundred ways.)

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