S . ESL Teaching

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...

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).

Last week something happened in school that got me thinking quite a lot about how we see failure. What is failure to us and why are we so scared of it? Yes, we are teachers and yes, we have a high responsibility, especially when teaching children, but we are also only human and all we can do is to do our best and learn from our mistakes to do it better next time. I was working in the teachers’ lounge when one of the teachers I coach” came in and started crying. I knew what happened, because half an hour earlier, there was this little 3 year old guy who came to us crying because he fell off a chair (by the way, he is doing great, it was just the first shock). As a side note: when little children cry, the best method to calm them down is to acknowledge their pein, but not for a long time. The best way is to completely change the topic to something unexpected, for example "what did you do yesterday or what did you eat today". And then have a conversation about it....

Time: about 45-60 mins  (notice that the time can be very different according to class size and abilities of the students) Routine: (5mins) Make a circle, have a small soft ball. Pass the ball and ask the child on your right side “What’s your name?" or any other question you want to teach them. The child answers and then passes the ball to the next child and asks the same question and so on. After one round spice it up and take the time the children need to finish one circle (I usually take my cell phone as a stopwatch) and encourage them to be quicker. I usually tell them that another group did one circle in 10 seconds (not true, but they don’t know that, so you change the time according to which results the children had in the first round and take away 1,2,3 seconds), and ask them if they can do better. Intro (5 mins) Have a set of flashcards (or simple construction paper in every color). Hold up the first card and elicit the color....

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...

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...

picture from:smartteachersblog I came across this blog post about labelling children and the consequences (you can read the article here: https://theconversation.com/labelling-kids-the-good-the-bad-and-the-adhd-31778 ) This reminded me of a case of a young child that sticks in my head for many years now. And I always love to tell his story, when I give workshops on classroom managment. How often do you come to the teachers' lounge and you hear teachers discussing a certain child and how their behavior is incredibly disrupting or how slow this child is or how funny this kid thinks he is? And how often do you find yourself treating this very child as neutral as all the others when you have to teach him? As a teacher trainer I don't know all the children that my teachers are teaching. They let me know when they have a problem with a child so I can give them advice on how to deal with him or her. Funny, that you barely never hear about how great a child is ... Anyhow, I ...