The Silent Way 🤫.

 Hello! Welcome again to my English Didactics blog! 💐✨

Today, I will tell you about another interesting method that we learned in class, and that is... The Silent Way 😶.

The Silent Way was founded around the 1970s by a mathematician and educator named Caleb Gattegno👨🏻‍🏫. He believed that language learning could be done in 3 different ways:

1. Discovering rather than teaching.
2. Problem-solving in the target language.
3. Use of physical tools.

Some of the main ideas or principles of this method are that you only need to help the student when necessary because the whole point of this is for the student to be able to solve their own problems or challenges so they can learn more (this method believes that the more you help, the less they learn). Another thing very important to mention is that here, progress is better than perfect; so basically it doesn't matter if you make a mistake, you still learn from it🥳. 

The Silent Way also works using different techniques which are:

• Sound-Color Chart: The chart contains blocks of color, each one representing a sound in the target language.
• Teacher's Silence: The teacher gives as much help as necessary and then is silent.
• Word Chart: Contains functional vocabulary of English. It can be used for teaching and correction.
• Rods: The students can see by visualized context. Situations with rods can clarify the meaning, connecting the language with the meaning. Rods allow students to be creative and imaginative.

Here are some pictures of the rods that teacher Orlando gave us to practice in the classroom, but typically the original rods are made out of wood. 😳

                           

As you can see, we were all so excited to have some of the rods😂. We were looking at them carefully and Dani even said that the small white rod looked like cheese🧀🧀🧀. After teacher Orlando had given each of the groups a set of rods, we were asked to make sentences with them, assigning each rod a specific function (ex. blue was the subject). Then we started practicing storytelling; we had to make a figure and come up with a story, for each sentence we said, we had to take away one of the rods. Here are some pictures of the figures we created, we made a flower🌸 and a sunset at the beach🏝️.

                           

This method was really fun because it was something completely new, at least for me, and we had to come up with different ideas while working with grammar. We also did some other exercises practicing phonetics! ☝🏼

Here is teacher Orlando passing the rods to each one of the groups! ✨

And well, this was all for The Silent Way method, a really interesting and challenging way of learning, it was definitely a very entertaining class for us😋. I hope you enjoyed this entry and had fun looking at some of the pictures, see you in the next one! bye! 👋🏻💛