S . ESL Teaching

My fellow teacher, Christine has shared those wonderful pictures of her ESL kids class with our facebook group. What a great idea! (Thanks again, Christine ;) ) When I saw the cups, it reminded of this game where you have 3 cups and somebody hides a ball under one of them, switches them around and you have to guess where the ball is (and in most cases it is not where you believe it is!). That would be a great activity for the kids. Make paper cups with animals, hide a ball, mix things up and then the child has to say "It's under the cow" or "It's under the lion". Or if they are capable of more, they can make longer sentences such as 'the ball is under the cow).

I played this game with a group of kids yesterday and they totally loved it. All you need is a die, blank paper and pencils. We did it with the snowman topic, but it can be played with other topics as well. The goal of the game is that the children should draw a complete snowman. BUT it's not that easy. They have to role the die and are only allowed to draw one part at a time. For example nk emotico They have to role the die and are only allowed to draw one part at a time. For example 1 = body 1= head     2 = eyes     3 = nose     4 = mouth     5 = arms     6 = hat Now one child throws the die and lands on 3, so the child is allowed to draw a nose (even though nothing else is on the paper yet, not even the body). Next time the child throws the die again and it lands on 5, it's allowed to draw the arms. If it lands again on a 3 - no drawing. The child who is able to finish his or her snowman first, wins. There can be some pretty funn...

So introducing new vocabulary with flashcards can be great fun and there are tons of games to play with flashcards. But as I said before, it can get quite boring if you always do the same stuff. I bought those little farm animals (nothing fancy) and introduced them to the kids. Having a surprise box is a lot more exciting than just placing the animals in front of their noses right away and telling them "This is a cow".  Make it a bit mysterious and take out one animal at a time and wonder what this is and what sound it makes. joke around and show a cow, but make a pig sound, for example. and then have the children correct your sound. A game I love to play is to put all the animals in a bag. One child gets blindfolded and takes an animal from the bag. He/She then has to feel the animal and guess which one it is without peeking. If the child can't guess it or guesses it wrong, the other children are allowed give some hints, but not say what animal it is. The kids al...

(bunting - activity. Examples from kids 4, 6, 10, 11 yo) When I do my teacher training, I often come across new teachers who have never written a lesson plan in their lives. Especially when teaching small children they are often a bit lost and don't know what kind of activities to do with children or how long an activity should last (please, don't plan an activity that takes 40 minutes ....) among many other things . So here is an idea on how you could start (see at the bottom of the post). It can easily be adapted for different ages. For beginner teachers, I often advise them to do a detailed plan. It takes a loooot of time and you may feel like it's nor worth it. After all the goal is not to plan for 4 hours just to teach 1 hour (and only get paid for that one hour!). Been there, done that! But believe me, at the beginning it is really worth it (I will write another blogpost about why you should have lesson plans), with time it will get easier and you will teach more...

Kids love lapbooks and we always have a lot of fun making them. It does take some time and preparation though and you might want to have a couple of things ready (like cutting things out, because it can take a lot of time for a child). Here is an example of a lapbook I made about "the farm" (slightly different from the video you see above, but just to give you an idea on how it can be used): The front (different kinds of crafting paper, glitter glue and stickers) This is what you see, when you open the "door of the barn": -Guessing game on the left (description of an animal, then open the flap to check and color), - Touchy feely part on the right, - In the middle a dot-to-dot activity booklet, a memory game with farm animals in the envelop and a minibook with a story to read and color. Underneath the big flap you find a coloring activity, a poem and a picture with mini-animals in the envelop. The kids have to read the text a...