Visual Learners

I teach a lot of right-brained visual thinkers. One of the things that was most attractive about TPR and TPRS to me initially was how right-brained friendly they are.

Currently I am reading Right-brained Children in a Left-brained World by Jeffrey Freed. I 've had a lot of thoughts about how his ideas mesh with TPRS, but haven't spent much time considering it in detail, mostly because I am reading the book in bed as I fall asleep. (I'm alternating that with El Hobbit - there's nothing quite like right-brained, Spanish speaking trolls running through your dreams, let me tell you!)

Anyway, Jeffrey Freed has a lot of tips on how to teach things that tend to be difficult to these students, like math facts or accurate spelling. One particular strategy jumped out at me as being very foreign language classroom friendly. The teacher and the student both have the same two words. They are competing to write the shortest sentence with those two words in it, and they must write their sentence correctly. I was thinking we could adapt that to having two teams in the class and relay race style have them come to the board, get their slips of paper with their two words, and write them on the board. A similar strategy I just ran across was a verb ladder game - there are two "ladders" drawn on the board and teams have to compete to fill in the conjugations of the verb until they have climbed the ladder.