Circling “I” and “We” during PQA

As a department, we noticed students having trouble identifying subjects that included ‘I” with other people. So I decided I wanted to come up with something to circle the “I” and “we” subjects. I decided I’d do some picture PQA.

The prompt was simple: Draw an activity that you do with other people.

I had students come to the front with their interesting drawings and we started talking. I started off each discussion with “Student and I are friends” And then circled that relationship a bit. “Are we best friends? Are we brothers? Are we enemies?”

Then got into the meat of the discussion. One student drew a picture of running. I circled the verb a bit “Bob and I run” “Do we walk? or do we run” etc. Maybe come up with a little bit of a story. One class had us throwing frogs into the pond, that was… interesting.

Then I changed it up, even though we did the activity together, *I* did the activity a little bit different. “Bob and I run, but I run slow. Bob runs fast” “Does Bob run slow or do I run slow?” Circling the subject is kind of hard there if students are ready to output “you” forms, so I tried to keep away from the wh- questions.

We’ll be doing a little more of this tomorrow and I’m hoping to end the week with a horizontal conjugation as an assessment.