Here is a story to be told in class with a bit of a twist in the delivery.  Typically, my order is about the same.  We begin by establishing meaning to new structures then move to personalized questions and then to an in-class story.   This one is a bit different.  The meaning of new structures and the personalized questions come up at different points of the story.  I know that some TPRS teachers are good at always weaving PQA into stories, but I struggle with it.  So for this unit, I deliberately created PQA breaks.

Here is the script with personalized questions included: El empleado del mes – script

Here are the slides I used as we went: El empleado del mes – slides

I also included a sheet for students to record structure definitions and take notes on the events of the story.  Again, this is not common for us.

Here is the sheet that students used to follow along: El empleado del mes – student guide 

The plot of the story is pretty simple.  There is an employee who has worked at a meatball company for many years and has been very successful.  He is a meatball salesman and has sold thousands of meatballs in his years.  However, the son of the owner of the company is also a salesman.  He has sold very few meatballs but always wins employee of the month because his father is the owner.  After so many years, the good salesman cannot take it anymore and decides to do something about the injustice.

Of course, the details (meatball company) can be changed and were different in each of my classes.  And, most of our stories ended pretty violently, which would not be necessary.

I was pleased with the results.  The actual plot of the story is pretty simple and boring.  The switch in delivery was enough to maintain student engagement.  One of my concerns was that it would be difficult to jump back and forth from personalized questions about real life to imaginary details of the story we were creating.  However, the transitions were smooth in all classes.