Wednesday, August 14, 2024

PQA - Is This a Good or Bad Pizza Topping?

I am now in my 2nd week of school with students. Things are definitely moving along, and like it or not, I am back in work mode. With my Latin 2 students, we have been doing review with PQA-based story about a character who plays baseball well, but there is another character who is better than he is and is the best baseball player (this is based on a demo which I have seen Eric Richards conduct in German several times - really good stuff!). These readings have been used to preview a cultural lesson on the sport vitilla (a sport similar to baseball played primarily in the Dominican Republic). I saw Skip Crosby present this lesson in a middle school Spanish language lab class at CI Summit this year, and I thought, "This is a great cultural topic. I do not want to only teach about the ancient world using Latin - I want to teach about modern culture in other parts of the world too in the Latin language!" (What is vitilla? How is it similar to/differ from baseball? Is there a correlation between vitilla and the fact that the Dominican Republic has the 2nd highest national representation among MLB players?).

Anyhow, my colleague John Foulk, as we were reviewing the words good, bad, better than, and best in Latin 2 as part of the baseball reading, created a PQA bellringer using these words regarding various pizza toppings. Since I am also teaching Latin 1, today I decided to try it out for the words good and bad as a bellringer. Here is the Latin 1 bellringer slide which I projected and the directions:


Observations
  1. What a great PQA! Everyone has an opinion about pizza toppings!
  2. After students finished writing down their responses for this bellringer, I asked them to raise their hand to answer "estne X bonus in pitta?" and then counted aloud in Latin how many agreed. This is how I expose students to numbers - I count in a context, instead of having them memorize how to count from 1-10 in the target language. I learned this from Haiyun Le.
  3. After writing down the number of people who said X is a good topping, I recast it by saying in Latin, "(Number) aestimant (corn) esse bonum in pitta!"
  4. I suppose that I could have listed the Latin words for the food items and not the English, but primarily, this was the 2nd week of Latin 1 - no need to overwhelm them with food words and secondly, those food words are NOT high frequency! My focus was on the high frequency, necessary words bonus and malus.
  5. I liked that students wanted to say if they thought a pizza topping was bad! I could ask a student, "Aestimasne (you think) X is malus in pitta?" Again, lots of opinions stated!
  6. I can see using this idea for ice cream toppings (believe me, do a internet search and you will find many odd toppings), soft drinks (Pepsi vs. Coke, Dr. Pepper vs. Mr. Pibb), things you can put on hamburgers, etc. 
  7. This is definitely an example of purposeful communication, because students are learning about each other, and the target language is solely serving as the means for that communication.
Thanks, John, for this great idea!

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