Take five

It's been too long since I've written a thing, so here I am. There's an activity I really like and would like to share - I used it to discuss learning styles with my students and they gave it a thumbs up which means it's GOOD. It's called a "sensory dictation" - I've heard about it from Marie in class this summer, but it can be found in Unlocking self-expression though NLP by Judith Baker and Mario Rinvolucri (Delta Publishing, 2008), as well as Dictation by Paul Davis and Mario Rinvolucri (CUP, 2002).

It goes like this:

• Write on board and draw a symbol for each of the senses like on the picture. I won't be drawing here, seeing my squiggles is a privilege that belongs to my students, but if I were drawing here I'd draw and eye, an ear, a nose, a hand and a smiley sticking it's tongue out - one of my students thought of it and it took on...

• Next, the teacher should dictate a list of 20-30 words. It can be anything really - I used just random everyday words I knew they were familiar with, because the point wasn't to revise, but to speak about learning styles. Next time, it might be words from a text or a unit. 
• As the teacher dictates, students write the words in columns according to what comes to them first when they hear the words. Let's say the word is ice cream: Do they see an ice cream? Do they hear that annoying ice cream truck or someone talking about an ice cream? Do they taste ice cream? The first ones will write the word in the first column, the second ones in the second and the third ones in the fifth I taste column. 
• After the dictation is done they discussed the following three questions in groups of three or four: In which column have you written the most words? Are there any empty columns? Why did you put a word in a column - is there anything interesting you noticed about yourself? 
• In the end I talked to them about learning styles and about how they scored in the dictation and what might that mean for them as learners. I felt listened to, because they asked questions, gave examples - some light bulbs were definitely lit.

So try it out. ;)

And another thing. Some exams like IELTS, TOEFL and CPE contain something called a long turn task. The candidate receives a question or a topic and needs to speak about it for a minute or two or 45 seconds, which is a long time. Some people simply shut down in the face of it repeating "What do I say? I have nothing to say." Pointing them towards thinking in terms of the five senses helps. If the task is to describe an experience, a person or a place, chunking the task down to the senses: What do I remember seeing/hearing/smelling/touching/tasting there? helps. Simple, but it was a revelation to me. 

Have a nice week.

All my love,

Dora

    

It's just the way I see it...

A little something I've learned...

Lenses we use on Prezi

For more info go here - this prezi is based on the text linked and mentioned in the Prezi itself.

Go fish!

This is one of my favorite Pilgrims' memories. The second day we were there our trainer Marie told us The Parable of the Dolphin. It goes something like this:

Once upon a time, a person interested in developing NLP went to a dolphin training center. There he observed a dolphin trainer at work - the one others had told him was the best. He did nothing special during training - when a dolphin did something well, he'd give it a fish. The NLP person wondered how come this trainer was the best, up until an evening he found him sitting at pool side talking to the dolphin, stroking him and giving it fish. "Why are you giving the dolphin fish?" asked the NLP person. "Just because." the trainer said. 

On that note, Marie gave us two pieces of paper each. A fish was printed on one side, the other side was blank. Our task was to give fish to people we noticed had done something well, as small as it might have been. It took on - fish were swimming across the group for the rest of our stay in Canterbury. Marie got a blue paper fish bowl with a hand-made fish from each of us at the end of our course. :)

My very own fish bowl <3

We all loved giving and receiving fish, some of us so much we started thinking about bringing some shape or form of it in to the classroom. We discussed it a couple of times and a few questions arose:

• What if a person in the class doesn't receive a fish? It happened to one of us the first day, and they were a bit hurt. Should the teacher react in some way? What if kids give out fish only to their friends and/or those they wish would like them? 
• A fish is a symbol closely connected to Christianity. Not everyone is comfortable with that, so think a little of your classes and maybe choose a different symbol - that means the parable probably won't work as the introduction, so think about the ways you could do it.

I hope you like the idea.

All my love, 

Do

P.S.
For another example of working with the fish click HERE.