S . ESL Teaching

One of the routines I have been using with the small kids is the following text. I have pictures of animals and do a lot of gestures in order to help them recognize what's going on. The animals come to school. (walk around) The lion is very tired. (show lion picture, yawn and look very tired) Lion, stretch your arm and yawn. (stretching and yawning) ROAR! And now let's go to school (walk around, have the kids do the same) The kangaroo is hungry (show image and rub your belly) Kangaroo, eat your sandwich (chew) MMMmmhhh! And now let's hop to school (hop around, have the kids do the same) The frog is having a bath (show picture, pretend to take a bath, rubbing your arms and singing lalalaaa) Frog, wash your legs (rub your legs) Splish, splash! And now let's jump to school (jump around, have the kids do the same) The owl is reading a book (show picture and pretend to read a book) Owl, pack your schoolbag (pretend to pack a bag) And now let's fly...

This week I sat down with one of my trainees and we discussed how a lesson for small children should look like. She will take over a class of 3yo. Our lessons are 90 minutes long and this is what we came up with. This plan is one that she will keep for the rest of the year, just changing up the   songs, games and activities for each lesson. Cuts down planning time quite a bit. 1. Routine: Circle time: - singing hello song - asking "how are you", always adding more feelings throughout the year - weather chart - once they are a bit older, the today's day - TPR - show the children a box with a puppet inside (the puppet is scared when there is too much noise, so they have to be quiet in order for it to come out of the box. And of course, it only speaks English!) - have a conversation with the puppet and with the kids (good time to repeat old vocab and questions and get the kids talking) - repetition of old topics through old song, vocab game etc - repetition of l...

Every morning, when I open my emails, I get "Today's inspiration" - a newsletter with a tiny quote of the day. Today it came up with a quote that made me think of a discussion I had with a teacher a while ago. The quote is the following: "Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else."  – Judy Garland Now I had this conversation with this first year teacher, who, after 2 months of starting work was on the edge of a burnout already. She sat in front of me and cried for about one hour nonstop. I don't know if she read the quote above or where she got her ideas from, but she thought that everything she is using in order to teach must be from her herself. The games must be from her own head, the flashcards must be made by her own hands and so on. So she literally drew all her flashcards by hand herself. I had asked her many weeks prior to this meeting why on earth she is doing all this? There are tons of things o...

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...

I often get asked about classroom management, especially with small children.  The mistake teachers often do is that they presume that kids will be sitting nicely on the chairs (or wherever) all lesson long and listen and interact with them the way they want them to. And if that's not happening, they feel incapable of managing a class and believe they are not good teachers. The problem with this is .. it is IMPOSSIBLE for a child to sit still during such a long period. No matter how great of a teacher you are and no matter how calm the child normally is. It is just not in their nature to sit still. As Sir Ken Robinson once said: A 3-year-old is not half a 6-year-old.  And a 9yo is not half a 18yo. You get the point. How long the attention span actually is, depends on different factors: age, but also the type of activity and the motivation of the student. The general concentration span of a child is between 10-15 minutes, when the task is not very demanding a...

Teaching with flashcards is my favorite way to teach new vocab. You should see the shoeboxes full of flashcards on my shelf! Whenever my husband comes into the office he points to my boxes and asks: “We throw them? We need more space!” :p. Don’t touch my boxes! Anyway, even if flashcards are a great way to teach new vocabublary, do yourself and your students a favor, and switch from time to time. Teaching with flashcards all the time can get anyone bored out of their skin. I also use realia (real objects) or ppt presentations, for example, but there are tons of other ways. But let’s get back to the flashcards. How I usually introduce the new words is by showing a flashcard, saying the word and have the kids repeat (yea, that’s the boring part .. but not for long). The same again with the second word. Once I have 2 words, the fun can begin.  I stick the cards to the board (the 2 that I taught so far), pointing to one card and saying the word, then pointing ...

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...

At the beginning of my teaching career I saw this awesome fellow teacher who was a master puppeteer. She knew exactly what she was doing and the kids were literally glued to their seats and listened to e-v-e-r-y word she said and answered ALL the questions the puppets asked them (yea, she had two puppets! :o! ). I was completely hooked and thought "man, this is so amazing! I gotta do this!!" I went out, totally motivated and happy, buying all the stuff I could find to set up a great scene. I got to the classroom with my 3year old kids (18 of them), was sooo looking forward to this and thought they are going to looove this and took out my puppet: "HELLOOOOO, my name is Waldo (it was a dog). What's your name??" What I expected was something like "My name is Maya".. boy, was I wrong! What happened? The kids jumped up, tearing the ears of the dog, hitting it on the head, tearing the tail and hitting some more...  So I silently put it back i...

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...

On the first day of an ESL class (or any class ;) ), the kids may be pretty nervous and shy, since it is a new setting with new people they may not know. So I always take things easy during the first lesson and put more emphasis on getting to know each other rather than teaching any vocabulary consciously - this will come naturally by imitating you etc anyways. Sitting in a circle is always a good idea. There are different ways that I use to start a lesson. One of them is that I have a box in which I hide a hand puppet (I have a zebra called Marty, like the one from the movie Madagascar). I put the box in the middle of the circle and ask the kids what they think is inside. Then I have Marty appear and have a little dialogue with him. I'm asking him what his name is and he asks me about my name and who I am. Then Marty asks the children what their names are. Another method I use is the microphone. I used an empty kitchen paper role an formed a ball with aluminium foil ...