Week 4- The silent way

Hi, I’m to have you on my blog again.

Today´s blog will discuss what we learned on February 13^th and 15^th.

On February 13^th we started learning more about some other drills that teachers can use when teaching languages, for example, teacher Orlando o brought a dice and asked the question “How do you feel today?” to some students and they had to answer based on their feelings and using the the face of the dice, so students answered “I feel happy/nervous/scared today”. After that, we made some translations in groups; teacher Orlando gave us the lyrics of a song (El breve espacio donde no estas by Pablo Milanes) in Spanish and a fragment of text from the book “Desiderata”.

On the other hand, we learned about “The Silent Way” which and has its origins in the early 1987. This method was created under three ideas: Discover rather than teaching, problem-solving in the target language, the use of physical tools; in order to understand those ideas, teacher Orlando told us about the technique of sound color chart, in simple words, it is about assigning a meaning to a color( number, a noun, or anything we want to teach),  and with that idea in mind, students can relate colors with sounds, but first, students have to get familiar with sounds, then students can remember words or rules by seeing a color.

On February 15^th, we practiced the silent way method, basically teacher Orlando gave us some rods so we could create a story with them, and at the same time we had to create a shape with the rod, in that way, we could associate colors with words. With my group, we tried to create the shape of a maquilishuat tree and an Izote flower, and our story was the following:

“Once upon a time there were 2 kids, Valentina and Jorguito, who were friends, their favorite activity was to play around a maquilishuat tree, one day Jorguito discovered he had a crush on Valentina, he started to write poems below the maquilishuat tree, to expresses his feelings for Valentina. When he had one hundred poems, he gave it to her in a beautiful book and their love bloomed like the Izote flower that was planted in their garden”.

On the other hand, we learned a little bit about the method of physical response (TPR) which was first presented by James Asher. In simple words, this method is about associating one movement with meanings, for example, touching a part of the body and saying the name of that part out loud.

Thank you so much for reading, I’ll see you later.