We often
think that greeting is something that the children do automatically, when they
enter the classroom. But this is not
necessarily the case, especially when you are teaching very small children.
You will find kids that might just walk past you, as if you are not even there,
staring blankly and running towards the toys they want to get to as soon as
they can (who wouldn’t run to the cool stuff!!). If you are lucky, you will see
some children smile at you. If you are very lucky they may say good morning.
And if you are very very lucky, they may even shake your hand, look you in the
eyes and say good morning. But those are
usually very few (ok, reeeaaalllyy few). So it is on you to teach them.
First of all, you should always stand in the door and greet the children with a
big smile on your face. Don’t do the mistake being busy with something in the classroom, preparing some
last minute things and waiting for
everybody to come in and sit down. Help the children get to know you and learn
that they can trust you and actually see that you are interested in them.
Otherwise you are not off to a good start.
So always have everything prepared when the children come into the classroom
and put on a big, happy smile, shake their hand and tell them “hello, it’s sooo
great to see you today.” Or whatever you want to say. If you teach “older”
small kids ;) you might even think about alternative, cool greetings such as
high fives and have them decide which ones they want to use that day. But
always make sure that they have eye contact with you and say a greeting.
Once you taught a little bit more English you can start adding questions, like “How
are you? What did you eat for breakfast? etc”
I personally love to use a class-passport. On the first day we make our own
passports and from then on, they use it every time they come into my classroom.
It’s like they actually come into an English speaking country. It also helps
the kids to switch languages in their head: “Now it’s English time!”
For every time they come to a lesson, they get a stamp or a sticker (they are
allowed to choose) in their passport. (You can use it also to give extra
stickers when they did something extraordinary and then exchange the stickers
for a little gift). But generally I just use it as a passport to get into the
classroom. If you allow them to take the
passport back home, you may find kids that forget theirs (well, not MAY, 99,9% of
probability that there will be somebody
in the class …) and they get really sad because of it (after all, stickers and
stamps are the coolest thing, aren’t they!). So to avoid the disappointed faces
or even tears, I would have a box next to my door, where they look for their
passports when they enter and put them back in there once they finished putting
their sticker.
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