The Power of Cuisenaire Rods

I still can remember my first day shadowing my teacher trainer a few years ago at Guaratinguetá. He started the class taking six or seven colored rods and naming them with chunks of words, then passed the rods around the students, so that every time each student took a determined rod, he or she had to repeat the chunks. In the end, there were seven chunks of words passing around the class and being said all together. Chaos!!! "This guy is crazy", I thought. Then he showed a piece of a movie and asked the students to raise hands every time they heard the words. It worked wonders!!! Despite being in a basic level of English, they could do that! Since then, every time I have some difficult audio, I use this method with my students.

This week I used the rods again, but with a different activity, still learned from Jairo, my teacher trainer mentioned above. I'll try to explain how it works:

After presenting the students all the vocabulary related to airport, I separate the students forming two pairs and two groups of four (12 students). Then I ask the pairs to go out of the room and wait for further instructions. I tell the groups of four that they aren't air traffic controllers anymore, now they are engineers and each group has to build an airport project. I give each group a bunch of rods to build the airport and tell them that the airport has to be safe and profitable. This is very important to say, otherwise air traffic controllers tend to build just runways, taxiways and fancy towers aiming just safety and forgeting about the terminal building, which in these activity would be bad because they wouldn't use all the vocabulary learned. In order to have two completely different airport project I have to say to one group that their main objective is profit and to the other one that theirs is safety. Then I go outside the class and tell the pairs that they are going to buy one of the projects. So they have to write down a questionnaire aiming safety and profit. After fifteen minutes, each pair goes to each project and start asking questions, then they exchange places. In the end, the ones who are going to buy the project have to decide for the best option and why they have chosen one or another.

Even the quieter students talked a lot, but the funniest part was that in the middle of the activity I had to ask them three times to have a coffee break. Great!! Isn't it?