S . ESL Teaching

A game you can play using this song ...  Have the kids sitting in a circle and close their eyes. (Prepare a biiig cookie, that you can reuse all the time, maybe using salt dough or just a paper cookie), walk behind the kids, sing a song together, drop the cookie behind one of the children without them noticing and sit down with them. Start the nursery rhyme using the real names of the kids instead of the animals. Each time a name is mentioned this child has to look behind them and then say "Not me"  or "Yes I have the cookie, mniam mniam mniam."

Chainez is an ESL teacher from France with 5 years experience. The youngest children she has taught were 3 years old. Read what she has to say … 1. Tell me about the teacher who has influenced your life the most and what made him/her different from all the others? I have always  been impressed by my teachers, most of the time in a positive way, but I have to mention one:  I remember  my  physics teacher who was efficient, nice and respectful towards us. That’s what made her different from my previous teachers. 2.When you first started teaching small children, what did you find the most challenging and how did you deal with it? The most challenging  thing was to keep them interested in the lesson all along the lesson. Then, I found out that it was important to prepare different activities  in advance  and only use   some of them   according to their interactions and mood. 3.What do you find the most rewarding asp...

Songs are a very powerful tool when it comes to language teaching - especially with small children. It makes learning the words so easy, you don't even realize that you are actually learning. Have you ever heard a song in a language that you don't even speak and found yourself singing it? You didn't understand anything but important was only that the words somehow sounded like in the song. It would probably sound something like this: Leddit gooo, leddit gooo and holit back nyoreeeee LEDDIT GOOO, LEDDIT GOOOO hmmm hmm and hmmm the doooorrrr (btw this is Disney's Frozen song: Let it go) Yea, we've all been there, haven't we? But the cool thing about this is ...  melody engages your brain. And imagine what you are capable of retaining with melody when you actually KNOW the words! Amazing! Now, there is a little catch with this. What many inexperienced teachers do is that when looking for songs to sing with their kids, they take song...