Teaching Vowels, part 4

Four: Gestures, An Illustration of Written Forms

In the second part of the sibling scenario that was not included above, Steiner made a connection between the vowel shape and the expressed emotion of the vowel sound.

“When we draw the shape of the sound ee, it seems to point toward what has been understood….” (Steiner, 2000, P. 69)

In the above mentioned song, we used gestures to illustrate the emotions, but they did not all necessarily illustrate the vowel form. Now conscious of wanting to make a connection between the emotion and the vowel image, I began to add to some of our actions and gradually dropped some of the old ones. For the U we began to throw our hands up into the air, when we said ‘ŭh!’ For ‘I’, we stretched whatever was icky and sticky, and pulled our hands apart until they pointed straight up and down, making the ‘I’ shape with our bodies. The letter E also evolved, but not until we began the next activity.