Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Language garden

The garden fills our life with hope, beauty and creativity. The full spectrum adds much love to nature and spurs a lot of creativity in gardeners.This applies to the language garden website and its wonderful plant maker. I have been addicted to this tool because of many reasons that relate mainly to my thirst for creativity.
I have had a lovely experience with the language plant maker and personally it has  

  • helped me be more patient and increased my flexibility
  • incited me to release more creativity ,often without realizing this
  • helped me reduce stress 
  • made me think more closely of the structure of any statement or quote
  • pushed me to ponder more on how to use this tool effectively in our classes, one day! 
Thiniking of ways to implement using the language plant maker in our classes, I'd like to share my ideas with you all and I hope you can add your thoughts and add to the list : 
  • We can use the language plant maker to review, introduce new vocabulary: We can make a word cloud with the tool , and add appropriate pictures to it, and this depends much on the level of the learners. We can also list some words that have a strong collocation or connection with a secret word, then ask the learners to guess the word related to this list of words or the word that strongly collocates with all of these words. We can also introduce a theme or a topic by presenting a quote or a proverb.In addition, we can focus on forming adjectives using  -ful or -less suffixes to some adjectives.
  • We can also use the plant maker to review a grammatical structure . Honestly, I think the plant maker is perfect for learners to focus deeply on a structure of a sentence by thinking on what is repeated in the sentence , or what is missing, etc.. A huge array of questions and exercises are possible to devise.
  • Teaching writing is possible,too, by using pictures with quotes as prompts for a writing exercise.
  • More importantly, the language garden urges learners to be more creative and imaginative. Asking them to sum up some lessons in the form of a language plant would add much beauty, interest to the language experience they are living. 
Here is the link to the language garden: http://www.languagegarden.org/ and the plant maker: http://www.languagegarden.com/PlantMaker2/index.html ! Give it a try and you will certainly be addicted to this online tool 
Let me just mention that mixing the language with pictures and sound is very awesome and inspiring as well . We wish David Warr more success with this tool.And as a member of his facebook group Language Garden, we are waiting for more updates to the tool. 
Below are some of my attempts with the tool. Hope you find them useful !
Complete the proverb....

What is the word that collocates with all these words?


Taste poetry in a different shape! 

Shape your proverbs differently!

Let your creativity take you  magic places !


Amaze your students and let them elicit proverbs on their own!
Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to David Warr  for his assistance and help.