PQA, TPR and TPRS oh my!

Well, our school year started last week on Wednesday and we're currently on the day 3 rotation (due to block scheduling).

My Spanish 1 students last year felt like we didn't do enough storytelling due to PQA (Personalized Questions and Answers) with Ben Slavic's "Circling with Balls" Interview activity and then jumping almost straight into the novels.

Since storytelling is one of my favorite things, I thought that we could do the following for class this year to start off:

1. Personalized Questions & Answers (Interviews about who does what in Spanish)
2. Total Physical Response
3. Storytelling

It's a little bit intense.  The idea was the get to more stories before the Agentes Novel so that it would be easier to read.

So far, it took about 8 days to get through story 1 of Blaine's revised Look I can Talk for Spanish 1.

Obviously, I would rather go too slow than too fast and the constant exposure each day of those first structures might be a way better way to go about doing this.  Their retells were pretty good and their writings weren't too bad either!  But I am not sure if at this rate we'll really get to more stories before starting Agentes next month.

Either way, it's nice to have 3 different activities and my students' brains seem to be able to handle that.  And it helps class to go faster.