Michiko Watabe
US Naval Ship Repair Facility and Japan Regional Maintenance Center (SRF-JRMC)
I work at the Language Training Division at SRF-JRMC. We teach English to Japanese employees and Japanese to US Navy service members and civilians. The students in our English classes are Japanese ship repair workers and those who support them. I’ve been teaching here for more than 20 years and have been using Cuisenaire rods in my classes. I met the rods in one of the JALT presentations in 1983. I'm happy to have this opportunity to share my ideas of using the great tool.
Sessions
Cuisenaire Rods: A Powerful Tool for the Classroom
The Cuisenaire rods are colored rods between one and ten cm long. They are excellent tools for classroom use. Rods can represent people, buildings, streets, cars, etc., as well as grammar structures like clauses in a sentence. Standing a blue rod beside a green one, for example, we can elicit, “Mr. Blue is taller than Mr. Green.” I’ll share several different ways to use the rods and explain why they are effective for language learning.