PLACE PREPOSITIONS; AFFIRMATIVE AND NEGATIVE FORMS OF TO BE: The teacher places some rods of different colours on a table. She ask for the students to make some statements about the position of the rods using place prepositions and the affirmative and the negative form of the verb TO BE. STUDENT A: the red rod is between the blue rod and the green rod. STUDENT B: the green rod is not near the yellow rod. STUDENT C: the brown and the black rods are behind the red rod. STUDENT D: the brown and the black rods are not in front of the red rod.
The teacher will take two groups cuiseinare rods in order to have two rods of each colour. Later he will take the couples of the same colour and he will stick in these pairs two stickers. In the first one a word the teacher is interested in his student learn, and the other rod a sticker with the translation of this word. Then he will share out the pairs of words among the students so the rods will be distributed in the classroom. Now the teacher will ask them to go out by couplets with the same colour ( we have used two cuiseinare rods) For example: 'the couplet with red colour'and they both will write on the board the word and its transtalation.This is an uncommon activity done in classroom and I think it could be useful to acquire vocabulary.
I am going to propose an activity based on that method to improve the students’ skills to learn a foreign language. In that particular case I am going to solve the problem that the students have when they have to create a new well-structures sentence. Sometimes they are not able to assimilate the correct order of the sentence structure. Thus, in this particular case the system of the Cuisenaire rods can be very useful. So, we can associated each of the coloured rods with a particular element of the sentence structure, for instance we can associate the red rod with adjectives, the white one with nouns, etc,. It is a variable in this activity. This is a wonderful way to activate visual memory, which normally is easy to activate than the intellectual one. In this sense, the mother tongue is minimally used. This activity also improve the students’ capacity to work as a team and if the activity is made in the foreign language (English in our case), it could be also beneficial to improve the participation of each pupil in a particular dialogue. So the fluent capacity to communicate between students orally is also improved with this activity. In terms of grammar the Cuisenaire Rods system can be excellent because children associate a set of colour with a certain kind of syntactical structure and in this way the learn easily the correct position of the grammatical elements in a sentence, and in the dialogues they are able to apply these knowledge.
I have been reading about Cuisenaire rods activities related to the Silent Way, and there is a lot of information. So, I don’t know if it is on the internet or not. At the end of the activity they will induce structures of the language by their own. With that activity we will be focusing on sentence structures. Each color represents one of the different categories. For example, the subject corresponds to white color, verb to the green, direct object to the red, indirect object to the blue….. The teacher mixes different rods and the students must build a correct structure. So if the teacher give them three rods (green, white and red), having in mind each function, the correct order will be white, green and red. But we can use this idea in other ways. Other possibilities are to make them form the correct structure that corresponds to the sentence written in the blackboard or invent a sentence that corresponds to the structure that the teacher has formed with some rods. When my activity was ready to be posted I have realized that it is quite similar to Mari Carmen’s activity but mine has more possibilities. So I have decided to add another activity. It consists on use different rods in order to represent something in the real world. The topic could be buildings or monuments and the aim is the use of the present perfect. So we can put two rods with the same measure vertically and ask them: What is it? They can think that the rods represent the “Twin Towers”, so that is the moment to ask them: Have you ever been in New York? Have you ever been in a sky building? We can represent with the rods a lot of things like Egypt pyramids, Pisa Tower …
I am going to propose a second activity after my first post. This activity can be useful to assimilate words families and the different ways of associate words among them by using prefixes, suffixes or something else. To do that activity the teacher must take a single longer rod on the table and he will give to the student some noun or maybe and adjective, later he will put other rods next to the first one. If he put another rod before the first one he will be asking his students for adding a prefix to the first proposed word. For example for the word 'sure' they must answer something like 'unsure'. On the other hand if teacher puts a rod after the first one, he will be waiting for an added suffix. For example for the word 'health', healthy could be a right answer. In the same way we could play with compounds. I mean ask students for a noun to create a compound noun from another proposed one instead of ask them for an affix. this activity can contribute improve students' vocabulary and thinking as a group to go further possibilities of derivate words that they as a single students would not be able to formulate.
I am going to present how I would give a lesson by using the Silent Way Method. For this lesson, students will deal with Simple Past Tense. This lesson shouldn’t take more than fifty minutes. So, let’s start!
First of all, the teacher will write three columns on the blackboard. The first one will be in blue and it will have personal pronouns. The second one will be in red and it will contain verbs written in simple past tense. In the third column they will find words such as dates, places, food, means of transport, adverbs…etc.
What they will have to do is to make up a story using the words on the blackboard and taking into account that words in blue must be used as a subject, the red ones as a verb and the yellow ones as complements. This part of the activity will be done between all the students and orally. The time for the starting of the class and this activity shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.
Afterwards, the teacher will have a chart with color rods; it means that, previously, s/he has prepared it in the following way, for instance:
(Blue) (Blue) (Red) (Yellow) (Yellow). (Blue) (Yellow) (Red) (Yellow) (Yellow) (Yellow)… and so on.
What the students will have to do then is to write their own story in simple past tense and not only by using the words on the blackboard, but also by using their background knowledge. This second part of the activity will be done individually. It shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes.
Once this second part is finished, the teacher will choose a student (María, for instance) to tell her story to the rest of the student. Then, it is time for the teacher to coordinate it. Once the story is told, the teacher will ask another student to say again one of the things that María has told before. For instance, ((Rocío, where did María stay?)) and Rocío says it. Then it is another student’s turn ((Carlos, ask Laura to ask María who did she go with))… and so on…
This third and last part of the activity won’t take more than 15 minutes and it will be entirely oral.
I think this is useful because we are trying to improve simple past tense using the same theme focusing on the writing and oral, mainly, skills.
My proposal for the activity based on the Silent Way method is the following: The teacher will bring the Cuisenaire rods into the class and the students will be divided in 4 or 5 groups. Each group will be given a Cuisenaire rod and each rod will be labelled with a topic and with a list of key words. All the Cuisenaire rods will have a keyword in common that will be the nexus for the second part of the activity. Once the students have their correspondent rod, they will work in their groups to create a story that will include the keywords given with the rod. They will spend over 15 minutes, more or less. When they have their stories, they will be requested by the teacher to develop a debate between all the groups with the teacher as a moderator. In that debate, each group will show their story to the rest of the groups by reading it aloud. After this, they will have to unify all the stories in one long story by using the common element that they all have inside their stories. When they had their long story, they will find that that story has no end, so the teacher will provide a list of clues to find the last Cuisenaire rod, that is hidden somewhere in the class. After the Cuisenaire rod is founded, the class will be again reunited as a whole group to give form to the end of the story, using the new list of keywords that will be included in this rod. With this activity/game I want my students to learn how to work in small and big groups. It will also improve their written and spoken production and they will use the grammar that they already know but as a tool, not as an end.
ACTIVITY: The teacher has a bag with some rods of each color inside. He/she will take one rod out of the bag, and immediately when students see the color of the rod they have to think in one sentence using the verbal tense that the tab represents. With the first rod, the spokesperson will be the student number one of each group, with the second rod the spokesperson will be the student number two and so on…but the answer is accorded by the whole group in order that they communicate between them in English saying examples of sentences that can be valid to win the rod. So when a group has an answer the student number one (in this case) will pick up the hand and he/she will answer. If the sentence is correct (a correct use of verbal tense), that group will win the tab; if the sentence is wrong, the other group could give its answer. Who win? The group that at the end of the class has more points, so the more rods they win (the more correct sentences they say) the more points they will have.
I propose an activity following the silent way method. The activity consists on recognize the functions of the words in a phrase . I would divide the class in two groups containing more or less ten or fifteen students per group. One of the groups, group number one, is given some Cuisinaire Rods (between 8-10 words/rods) in which are written the words to create the sentence.This group must organize the rods creating a correct sentence and with sense, the teacher can´t correct them the students must be independent learners. The group number 2 is given the same number of Cuisinaire rods but in these rods are written the function of the words of the group number 1.Group number 2 must give the functions to all the words that the group one has created in the sentence. Doing this activity the students can improve their grammar´s skills
I am going to give two differents exercises with cuisainare rods. The first of them consists on make practises on first conditional, and the second one consists on make sentences using the interrogative pronouns. The first activity consists on making practises using the first conditional combined with the verb “to take”. The teacher should group the students by couplets. Each couplet will have a small number of rods, one will take a rod and the other one should give a sentence using the first conditional with verb “to take”. For example, the student A takes a blue rod and the student B should say, “If tou take a blue rod, I will take a green rod”. The second activity consists on catch up with each colour a different interrogative pronoun. In this way, each colour corresponds with an interrogative pronoun, for example, colour green means where; red, when; blue, what; purple, which… In a group with four or five students, one of them will select a rod from a black bag, and then the person who takes the rod has to prove a suitable phrase using interrogative pronouns. After that, this person should give the bag to one of his mates, the one who answer the question.
I am going to propose a communicative game that students assume personalities. The students interacts and try to guess who the other student is. It can be played in groups of 4 and its adaptable to all levels and goes over well with childrens and adults. We can use a template to create the board. Students can practice the third person by taking on the personality as a friend and asking questions about her. How to play : - give every student one game board -2 students meets and play rock paper scissors -The looser will choose one of the personalities down the left column ( of the board ) Its a secret what personality they choose, so they should do this silently - The winner of rock paper.. can now ask 2 questions : Did you play the guitar yesterday ? Did you study yesterday ? And with this information you can choose the uknown character corresponding the board.
PLACE PREPOSITIONS; AFFIRMATIVE AND NEGATIVE FORMS OF TO BE:
ResponderEliminarThe teacher places some rods of different colours on a table. She ask for the students to make some statements about the position of the rods using place prepositions and the affirmative and the negative form of the verb TO BE.
STUDENT A: the red rod is between the blue rod and the green rod.
STUDENT B: the green rod is not near the yellow rod.
STUDENT C: the brown and the black rods are behind the red rod.
STUDENT D: the brown and the black rods are not in front of the red rod.
The teacher will take two groups cuiseinare rods in order to have two rods of each colour. Later he will take the couples
ResponderEliminarof the same colour and he will stick in these pairs two stickers. In the first one a word the teacher is interested in
his student learn, and the other rod a sticker with the translation of this word.
Then he will share out the pairs of words among the students so the rods will be distributed in the classroom. Now the
teacher will ask them to go out by couplets with the same colour ( we have used two cuiseinare rods) For example:
'the couplet with red colour'and they both will write on the board the word and its transtalation.This is an uncommon activity done in
classroom and I think it could be useful to acquire vocabulary.
I am going to propose an activity based on that method to improve the students’ skills to learn a foreign language.
ResponderEliminarIn that particular case I am going to solve the problem that the students have when they have to create a new well-structures sentence. Sometimes they are not able to assimilate the correct order of the sentence structure. Thus, in this particular case the system of the Cuisenaire rods can be very useful. So, we can associated each of the coloured rods with a particular element of the sentence structure, for instance we can associate the red rod with adjectives, the white one with nouns, etc,. It is a variable in this activity. This is a wonderful way to activate visual memory, which normally is easy to activate than the intellectual one. In this sense, the mother tongue is minimally used. This activity also improve the students’ capacity to work as a team and if the activity is made in the foreign language (English in our case), it could be also beneficial to improve the participation of each pupil in a particular dialogue. So the fluent capacity to communicate between students orally is also improved with this activity.
In terms of grammar the Cuisenaire Rods system can be excellent because children associate a set of colour with a certain kind of syntactical structure and in this way the learn easily the correct position of the grammatical elements in a sentence, and in the dialogues they are able to apply these knowledge.
I have been reading about Cuisenaire rods activities related to the Silent Way, and there is a lot of information. So, I don’t know if it is on the internet or not. At the end of the activity they will induce structures of the language by their own.
ResponderEliminarWith that activity we will be focusing on sentence structures. Each color represents one of the different categories. For example, the subject corresponds to white color, verb to the green, direct object to the red, indirect object to the blue….. The teacher mixes different rods and the students must build a correct structure. So if the teacher give them three rods (green, white and red), having in mind each function, the correct order will be white, green and red. But we can use this idea in other ways. Other possibilities are to make them form the correct structure that corresponds to the sentence written in the blackboard or invent a sentence that corresponds to the structure that the teacher has formed with some rods.
When my activity was ready to be posted I have realized that it is quite similar to Mari Carmen’s activity but mine has more possibilities. So I have decided to add another activity. It consists on use different rods in order to represent something in the real world. The topic could be buildings or monuments and the aim is the use of the present perfect. So we can put two rods with the same measure vertically and ask them: What is it? They can think that the rods represent the “Twin Towers”, so that is the moment to ask them: Have you ever been in New York? Have you ever been in a sky building? We can represent with the rods a lot of things like Egypt pyramids, Pisa Tower …
I am going to propose a second activity after my first post.
ResponderEliminarThis activity can be useful to assimilate words families and the different
ways of associate words among them by using prefixes, suffixes or something else.
To do that activity the teacher must take a single longer rod on the table and he will
give to the student some noun or maybe and adjective, later he will put other rods next to the first one.
If he put another rod before the first one he will be asking his students for adding a prefix to
the first proposed word. For example for the word 'sure' they must answer something like 'unsure'.
On the other hand if teacher puts a rod after the first one, he will be waiting for an added suffix.
For example for the word 'health', healthy could be a right answer. In the same way we could play with compounds.
I mean ask students for a noun to create a compound noun from another proposed one instead of ask them for an affix.
this activity can contribute improve students' vocabulary and thinking as a group to go further possibilities of
derivate words that they as a single students would not be able to formulate.
SIMPLE PAST
ResponderEliminarACTIVITY: Make Up a Story!
I am going to present how I would give a lesson by using the Silent Way Method.
For this lesson, students will deal with Simple Past Tense. This lesson shouldn’t take more than fifty minutes. So, let’s start!
First of all, the teacher will write three columns on the blackboard. The first one will be in blue and it will have personal pronouns. The second one will be in red and it will contain verbs written in simple past tense. In the third column they will find words such as dates, places, food, means of transport, adverbs…etc.
What they will have to do is to make up a story using the words on the blackboard and taking into account that words in blue must be used as a subject, the red ones as a verb and the yellow ones as complements. This part of the activity will be done between all the students and orally. The time for the starting of the class and this activity shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.
Afterwards, the teacher will have a chart with color rods; it means that, previously, s/he has prepared it in the following way, for instance:
(Blue) (Blue) (Red) (Yellow) (Yellow). (Blue) (Yellow) (Red) (Yellow) (Yellow) (Yellow)… and so on.
What the students will have to do then is to write their own story in simple past tense and not only by using the words on the blackboard, but also by using their background knowledge. This second part of the activity will be done individually. It shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes.
Once this second part is finished, the teacher will choose a student (María, for instance) to tell her story to the rest of the student. Then, it is time for the teacher to coordinate it. Once the story is told, the teacher will ask another student to say again one of the things that María has told before. For instance, ((Rocío, where did María stay?)) and Rocío says it. Then it is another student’s turn ((Carlos, ask Laura to ask María who did she go with))… and so on…
This third and last part of the activity won’t take more than 15 minutes and it will be entirely oral.
I think this is useful because we are trying to improve simple past tense using the same theme focusing on the writing and oral, mainly, skills.
My proposal for the activity based on the Silent Way method is the following:
ResponderEliminarThe teacher will bring the Cuisenaire rods into the class and the students will be divided in 4 or 5 groups. Each group will be given a Cuisenaire rod and each rod will be labelled with a topic and with a list of key words. All the Cuisenaire rods will have a keyword in common that will be the nexus for the second part of the activity.
Once the students have their correspondent rod, they will work in their groups to create a story that will include the keywords given with the rod. They will spend over 15 minutes, more or less. When they have their stories, they will be requested by the teacher to develop a debate between all the groups with the teacher as a moderator. In that debate, each group will show their story to the rest of the groups by reading it aloud. After this, they will have to unify all the stories in one long story by using the common element that they all have inside their stories. When they had their long story, they will find that that story has no end, so the teacher will provide a list of clues to find the last Cuisenaire rod, that is hidden somewhere in the class.
After the Cuisenaire rod is founded, the class will be again reunited as a whole group to give form to the end of the story, using the new list of keywords that will be included in this rod.
With this activity/game I want my students to learn how to work in small and big groups. It will also improve their written and spoken production and they will use the grammar that they already know but as a tool, not as an end.
ACTIVITY:
ResponderEliminarThe teacher has a bag with some rods of each color inside. He/she will take one rod out of the bag, and immediately when students see the color of the rod they have to think in one sentence using the verbal tense that the tab represents. With the first rod, the spokesperson will be the student number one of each group, with the second rod the spokesperson will be the student number two and so on…but the answer is accorded by the whole group in order that they communicate between them in English saying examples of sentences that can be valid to win the rod. So when a group has an answer the student number one (in this case) will pick up the hand and he/she will answer. If the sentence is correct (a correct use of verbal tense), that group will win the tab; if the sentence is wrong, the other group could give its answer. Who win? The group that at the end of the class has more points, so the more rods they win (the more correct sentences they say) the more points they will have.
I propose an activity following the silent way method. The activity consists on recognize the functions of the words in a phrase . I would divide the class in two groups containing more or less ten or fifteen students per group.
ResponderEliminarOne of the groups, group number one, is given some Cuisinaire Rods (between 8-10 words/rods) in which are written the words to create the sentence.This group must organize the rods creating a correct sentence and with sense, the teacher can´t correct them the students must be independent learners. The group number 2 is given the same number of Cuisinaire rods but in these rods are written the function of the words of the group number 1.Group number 2 must give the functions to all the words that the group one has created in the sentence.
Doing this activity the students can improve their grammar´s skills
I am going to give two differents exercises with cuisainare rods. The first of them consists on make practises on first conditional, and the second one consists on make sentences using the interrogative pronouns. The first activity consists on making practises using the first conditional combined with the verb “to take”. The teacher should group the students by couplets. Each couplet will have a small number of rods, one will take a rod and the other one should give a sentence using the first conditional with verb “to take”. For example, the student A takes a blue rod and the student B should say, “If tou take a blue rod, I will take a green rod”. The second activity consists on catch up with each colour a different interrogative pronoun. In this way, each colour corresponds with an interrogative pronoun, for example, colour green means where; red, when; blue, what; purple, which… In a group with four or five students, one of them will select a rod from a black bag, and then the person who takes the rod has to prove a suitable phrase using interrogative pronouns. After that, this person should give the bag to one of his mates, the one who answer the question.
ResponderEliminarI am going to propose a communicative game that students assume personalities. The students interacts and try to guess who the other student is. It can be played in groups of 4 and its adaptable to all levels and goes over well with childrens and adults. We can use a template to create the board.
ResponderEliminarStudents can practice the third person by taking on the personality as a friend and asking questions about her. How to play :
- give every student one game board
-2 students meets and play rock paper scissors
-The looser will choose one of the personalities down the left column ( of the board ) Its a secret what personality they choose, so they should do this silently
- The winner of rock paper.. can now ask 2 questions : Did you play the guitar yesterday ? Did you study yesterday ? And with this information you can choose the uknown character corresponding the board.