Puzzland: Based on Materials by A. Nesterenko

Edgar Lasevich, Julia Sokol and Alexander Sokol, Latvia

Edgar Lasevich, Julia Sokol and Alexander Sokol all represent the Thinking Approach project. The project is concerned with the development of technologies and materials for an integrated development of language and thinking skills of learners. More information on the project website www.thinking-approach.org, E-mail: contacts@thinking.approach.org

Menu

Introduction
The City of Mysterious Descriptions
City of Mysterious Parts
City of Mysterious Places
References

Introduction

Adult learners. Everything seems clear with them. They can learn and acquire models of thinking, apply them to new problems, they can even plan their own learning. Young adults seem to cope as well. But what about our younger learners? Much younger ones? Can we teach any thinking skills to them as well?

The idea of teaching the models of thinking to those who make their first unsteady steps in the field of language learning may look absurd. So, let us see if it is.

        Guess what it is:

(1) Round as the sun,
Light as a feather,
White as snow.

        What is it? It is a ping-pong ball.

        Good. Let us try one more:

(2) Melts but not snow,
Shines but not a lamp,
Pours out drop by drop but not rain.

        Is it a candle? Right you are.

The City of Mysterious Descriptions

We have come to a magic Puzzland. Now we are going to learn how to make our own puzzles. The first place we are going to stay at is: The City of Mysterious Descriptions.

First we choose an object: a ping-pong ball, for instance. Then we can place it in the center of the board or draw a table.

Now, we are halfway through. It is easy to sum it all up in a puzzle:

(3) I can say "pearls" but cheap,
I can say "glass beads" but big,
I can say "an egg" but it is unbreakable.

We can create as many puzzles as we want for the same object. The (1) puzzle was about the same ping-pong ball but we used a different table to write it in.

Here is one more table to create another puzzle.

(4)Flies but not a bird,
Bounces but not a hare,
Beats but not a heart.

Now we can each write our own puzzles and make the class guess. We can divide the class into teams and play a game where a learner scores a point for a correct puzzle and two points for guessing it. Later, we ask our learners to make their puzzles rhyme.

City of Mysterious Parts

The second place in our Puzzland is called: The City of Mysterious Parts. We now concentrate not on an object as a whole but on its constituent parts, as in:

Make it in a puzzle:

(5) The sun is in the marsh,
The marsh is in a shell.
What is it? (An egg)

City of Mysterious Places

The third is: The City of Mysterious Places:

(6) It is born in green but stored in transparent. (peas)

We can later ask our pupils to create metaphors and use them in everyday speech. "Yesterday, I got up at 7. I washed mirrors of the face (eyes) and I went to the kitchen where I drank the darkness of the night (coffee)." They can also produce new names for different objects, for example: ink-disguiser (correcting fluid), dream-killer (an alarm-clock).

Now it is time we came back to the initial question. Is it absurd to teach the models of thinking to very young learners? Perhaps it is, but we have just done it. Our learners have made their first steps to understanding such models of thinking as the ENV (Element - Name of Feature - Values of Feature) and the multi-screen, And we bet they liked it.

For a specific description of thinking models and a discussion of how they can be applied in a language classroom, see the Thinking Approach project website at www.thinking-approach.org. And we bet they liked it.

References

Nesterenko A. (1995). Puzzland. Rostov-on-Don. Rostov State University Press. (in Russian)

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Humanising Large Classes course at Pilgrims website.