First day of school - Greetings

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.

The scene could look something like this: You stand at the door like a flight attendant. The child enters, takes his or her passport. You greet the child saying (while shaking hands and looking him or her into the eyes) “Hello and welcome to … (Miss xyz ‘s English class). May I see your passport, please?” Check the passport and let him put a sticker or stamp and put it back into the box. After a few lessons you can add “welcome to .. how are you today? May I see your passport … etc”.

You can download the passport in the picture: here