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Activate senses and cultivate interest in learning

Ma Mingying, 【Hong Kong, China】

Starting from a towering building on flat ground, the initial stage, writing stage, and composition stage are the basic nutrients and skills for students' growth. For lower grade students, writing in the initial stage is of utmost importance in teaching. Not only should students resist writing essays due to high requirements, but they should also lay a solid foundation for writing in middle and higher grades. Therefore, the cultivation of writing interest cannot be ignored.

The brain is the center of all senses, and the senses are organs that sense external stimuli. Ms. Christie Ward, a New Zealand educator, wrote in her book "Friendly Brain Accelerated Learning Methods" that the "multisensory teaching method" is to stimulate students' auditory (A), visual (V), and dynamic perception (K) senses, allowing them to learn actively, easily, and happily. This is to stimulate all of students' senses and establish a deep memory of classroom activities. The more senses activated, the more pathways can be utilized, establishing more neural connections, which means more memories can be easily stored. So the teaching of composition in lower grades can also use methods that stimulate students' multiple senses and stimulate their interest in writing.

1、 Open the window of the soul with vision

The teaching of composition for lower grade students mainly focuses on drawing pictures and writing sentences as training points. When students see a picture, vision is a direct sensory experience. As a teacher, one should not set preconceived frameworks for children based on elements such as "characters," "locations," and "what to do." Instead, students should be allowed to observe and talk about what they see. Students' speeches can be scattered or illogical, and expressing what they observe freely is the goal. In this process, more classmates can be found to supplement, just like a process of searching for treasures. The role of the teacher is to string these "treasures" together, guide them to sort out the order of pictures and speech from their speeches, perceive the emotions of characters from their expressions, judge the theme of writing from the characteristics of things, clarify students' internal logic, and let them try to find ways to read from the pictures and speech. Perceive things around you in the picture, establish awareness of life, and ultimately implement it in writing.

2、 Listen to the voice of life through auditory perception

Lower grade students do not have much life experience yet, and when faced with writing, they often have no way to start writing. Teachers can initiate a 'voice sharing session' to discuss human voices (speaking, emotions, eating, sleeping, exercising, working); Animal sounds (calls, movements); The sound when using things (daily necessities, school supplies, musical instruments, toys, snacks); Search for sounds in various aspects of nature, such as wind, rain, lightning, snow, hail, and water sounds, and then share them at the class's "Sound Sharing Meeting". Students can perform with props themselves, and when everyone gathers firewood, the flames become high. Students' perception of hearing will accumulate a lot, and the teacher will summarize from this; When speaking and writing, adding voice can be used as a supplement.

3、 Smell delicious life with your sense of smell

The taste of fruits is sweet, the taste of vegetables is fragrant, and the taste of flowers is refreshing. Every thing has its unique flavor, so we need a nose that is good at discovering flavors to taste every dish in life. When describing something, students can use sentence structures such as "What is the smell of..." and "I smell the smell of..." to train their writing. For example, if I smell a sour smell, it turns out that my mom put vinegar in the dish; He was holding a bouquet of fresh flowers in his hand, with a fragrant aroma that filled his nose; The scent of apples is sweet, I really want to take a bite... Sentence imitation exercises can effectively provide students with templates and directions, and students can only upgrade and innovate their language by following the example.

4、 Taste the various aspects of life with taste buds

Sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, and salty are the various aspects of life. The tongue is one of the important organs in the human body, which not only allows us to speak clearly, but also enables us to taste various flavors. When students practice writing pictures about food, the one-dimensional nature of the pictures often leaves them at a loss. As people's living standards continue to improve, students have a rich understanding of food. Therefore, starting from life experience, students can describe the taste and use their sense of taste to perceive warmth, softness, sweetness, bitterness, and spiciness. This is not difficult for lower grade students, as they can describe it in language. In teaching, I have found that mentioning food can also attract students' attention and interest. Once students have interest, they will naturally transfer to writing.

5、 Perceive the essence of things through touch

We use our hands every day, and touch occurs in every aspect of life and learning. Touching objects with hands is an action, corresponding to the "verb" in Chinese language. Teachers can guide students to try expressing their understanding of things and events using continuous verbs, such as "he first opens his exercise book, takes out a pencil to write on paper, and then wipes off the eraser". In classroom teaching, I found that students are very interested in continuous actions. On this basis, they use adjectives such as "soft, hard, cold" to feel the essence of things. In this process, students have already achieved creativity. With the gradual enrichment and accuracy of their language use, students have gained a sense of achievement, and their interest in writing has been greatly improved.

Writing cannot be separated from life. Only when life is enriched to a certain extent can it be made into what kind of writing Mr. Ye Shengtao's sentence succinctly expresses the relationship between writing and life. Life is the source of writing, and younger students often gain their feelings about life through direct physical contact with their senses. Interest is the best teacher, and it is also the best driving force for writing. Only when students develop an interest in writing can they better accept it and transform it into words, which will naturally follow. For lower grade teachers, writing teaching cannot ignore their interest in writing, and using their senses to cultivate their interest in writing requires us frontline teachers to explore with dedication.





ISSN: 3066-229X  E-ISSN:3066-8034   Copyright © 2024 by Reviews Of Teaching

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