Guided Visualisations with 9 year old pupils

Primary
Songul Erdogan, Turkey

Every year in the Turkish curriculum some activities are done in the second week of November related to Atatürk, who was the founder of the Turkish Republic. November 10^th is the commemoration of Atatürk. As a nation we love and owe him a lot for leaving us a modern country. So every Turkish child is brought up being taught his principles and what a great leader he was.

I was with one of my colleagues discussing what to do that week. I did not want to do the same kind of exercises. All of a sudden I had a great idea of writing a guided fantasy which is an NLP technique used in ELT. "Guided fantasies act as metaphors and allow the non-conscious mind to work its magic. You can use them to deliver powerful and empowering metaphors to your students and to yourself." * Immediately, we started writing the following guided fantasy:

Sit comfortably and close your eyes.
Take deep breaths and relax.
Now, you see a small boat in front of you and you get on the boat. You are in the boat.
The boat slowly takes you to a beautiful island.
You get out of the boat.
What do you see on the beach?
What do you hear?
How do you feel?
Then you start walking.
You see a forest.
You are in the forest.
You are walking now.
Look around!
What do you see?
What do you hear?
Look down!
There are beautiful flowers.
What colour are they?
Smell them!
You keep walking and come to a hill.
You walk up the hill.
On the hill you see somebody.
He has got blue eyes and blond hair.
He is very handsome. Who is he? (By the way Atatürk had blue eyes and blond hair.) You start talking to him.
Think of three questions you want to ask him.

When you are ready, come back to the classroom and open your eyes.

We were very excited and immediately wanted to try this out with our 9 year-old pupils who have been learning English for about 4 years. As soon as I went into the classroom, I told my pupils that I was going to take them on a trip. They were all surprised. I hadn't used guided fantasies with them before. Before starting the activity, I taught them some key words that would help them understand the activity better. Making sure everybody understood the words, I told them to sit comfortably and relax. I started reading the above text slowly with some soft music on the background. I left plenty silence between the sentences to give the children time to form their pictures. While reading, most of my eighteen pupils looked so relaxed and happy. Of course, a few of them were not able to close their eyes all the time and could not concentrate. However, they also felt that they must pretend to be like the others.

When they opened their eyes, I asked them how they felt and if they really went to the island and if so what they saw on the island and what colour flowers they saw. They enthusiastically described the beach, the trees and the flowers they had seen. Only very few pupils said they could not see anything. "In this technique there is usually someone confessing some 'failing', such as 'not seeing proper pictures'. Here is the good news: You cannot do this wrong! What is important is to notice how your mind works. Everyone is different. Everyone can imagine or make some kind of image. The pictures may be blurry or merely a vague idea or sense of a picture, rather than the clear picture you get when you actually look through your eyes at the outside world. Maybe their imagination is strongly auditory or kinaesthetic. That's how they perceive the world. What is interesting is that they are still able to answer questions about their 'pictures', even if they say they do not 'see' any! "

Then I got some of the students to become Atatürk and answer their friends' questions. It was obvious that they would ask simple questions such as 'What is your favourite food? What is your favourite colour/animal/team?' And so they did. However, some of them asked really serious questions like 'How did you save the country?' When I asked them how they felt during the activity, they told me that they had really enjoyed it. One of the people who also enjoyed this activity was me!

After the lesson, I talked to my colleague who also used this technique in her class. She said her pupils enjoyed the activity a lot and very few pupils could not follow the guiuding voice. One of her pupils answered the question 'Who is he?' by shouting one of his friends' name because his friend has blue eyes and blond hair too. That was really funny.

I strongly recommend the use guided fantasies in your classes after having the experience of how well it worked with my 9 year-old pupils.

Please check the Primary TT courses at Pilgrims website.