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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 6; Issue 1; January 2004
Clay Verbs
Primary, secondary and adult
MS PA N.L.P.
Time: 10 minutes
Level: Beginners or young learners
Material: A small amount of non-toxic clay or plasticine for each student
Focus: A kinaesthetic way of teaching verbs
Procedure:
Give each student some clay or plasticine. Keep some for yourself.
Give commands to the group as you perform the action with the clay.
Students perform the action with their piece of clay. Here are some examples of commands:
- Squeeze it.
Poke it with your finger.
Roll it between your two hands.
Join the two ends together.
Twist it.
Pat it.
Throw it up in the air and catch it.
Give it to the person sitting next to you.
Work on sequences of five to nine commands. Go through them several times in the same order.
Gradually introduce random order into the commands.
Go around the group and ask individual students to give commands starting with one at a time and building up to two, then three or four.
Put students in pairs and ask them to take turns giving commands to each other. Anything is acceptable as long as it can be carried out with the piece of clay.
Variation:
During phrase 6. and 7. Students use the commands they have learned to build up a simple object with the clay.Comments:
This activity is inspired by Total Physical Response, a system for learning languages based on associating a command with an action. Dr James Asher developed this approach. From an NLP point of view, it uses the kinaesthetic modality.