So, today, I was going to start a story from Anne Matava's scripts about dirty hotel rooms. So I put the words up on the board: (bed)room, travels, and dirty. In the past, I have written the words on the board, given the gestures, and jumped into the story. Today, I remembered that oh-so-important step of PQA. I have a class of 26 squirrely kids. They are really really excited about French, but they also get really really excited about anything anyone else says and go way off topic.
Today, I started out by asking a kid what color his bedroom is. This is a quieter boy who doesn't interact much with the class. He said his room is white. Boring! So I asked him if he has a lot of posters on his walls, thinking that maybe I could spice this up. Nope, no posters. So of course, I told the class that he had 27 posters of cute little kittens in his room. They loved it. We talked some more about his love of cats and I moved on to another student...ignoring the loudmouths who were begging for me to pick them. I asked a girl about her room and if she had any chairs in it. She said that she did, so I asked how many and what color. My goal was to have very distinct rooms for each student. I wanted one student to have posters, one to have a chair, and one to have a television...recycling vocab that they already know.
At the end of the hour, the kids started to get restless and goofy from all the hilarious CI I was giving them about their classmates...so I had them take a quick comprehension quiz and BINGO, class is over.
I finally understand when teachers say, "I could have hurried through the PQA and forced a story...but we were having so much fun with PQA!" Now, I have two more structures that I can PQA tomorrow during a block and then start the story.
Hooray PQA!
There is a kind of a no man's land there in the middle of class where, if the PQA loses energy, we don't have enough time to get a story cranked up. What to do in that case? I just generally take some of the PQA facts gathered up to that point and make a little scene about them, not really a story (with all of that pressure!) - just a little laid back scene about the kids in my class - instead of trying to get back to the original script, if that makes sense. And like you say, the script is always there for another day. What if the PQA goes like, three fourths of the way into class before it fades? I just do a dictation at that point. Love your blog!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for the kind words. Sometimes I have to remind myself to blog and other times I can't wait to get to a computer to say something!
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