Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 3; May 2001
Building abstract nouns.
(Section 6- language stretching.)
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Time: 30 minutes.
Purpose: To invite students to build their own representations of abstract nouns and to discuss these representations with others.
Preparation: Take two or three boxes of Cuisenaire rods into class.
Lesson outline:
- Write some abstract nouns on the board such as balance, chaos, friendship, loneliness, equality, respect, oppression, perfection, gravity, variation, availability, opportunity, rhythm etc.
- Take some rods and build your own model of one of the words above without saying which one.
- Ask the students which word is represented by the "rods model" and why. Finish by giving more
details about your model.
- Divide the students into groups of three and four. Give them a box of rods and ask them to take
turns in building models of an abstract noun. Again, other members of the group should interpret the
model before the builder tells them which noun is represented. Other members may well have
different ways of modelling the same noun. Invite them to do so.
- It is important that each model should be valued as it stands. Different models of the same noun should be presented as simply the way that person sees it. Each representation has equal value.
Acknowledgement: From Caleb Gattegno, founder of The Silent Way, we learnt the thrill of standing back and watching students make their own discoveries about phonology and grammar. This exercise carries Gattegno's thought into the area of meaning.
