Category: Teaching

“Immerse” children directly and immediately into the target language from the first opening day or hour of class. Be natural and make it fun.

It is crucial to the success of your program that you speak in the target language all the time. Keep your language simple but natural, and keep it at their level.

To be effective, you need to speak slowly, clearly, and use easily understandable and comprehensible cognates, at least to the best of your ability. It is not necessary to translate.

There are several techniques that will help you understand how to concentrate your effort in teaching the language by using the language.

Use mime, visual stimuli, gestures, appropriate modeling, exaggerated changes of pitch and volume, basic grammar and techniques such as TPR to facilitate the effectiveness of the program.

Use visual stimuli such as, posters, flash cards, props, manipulatives, puppets and other materials to introduce the target language. They can help everyone in your class take the risk of trying out new language structures and practice the vocabulary being taught in a fun way and without noticing it.

Props and manipulatives that can be touched, squeezed, and passed around are appealing to small children and are of great help when learning a new language.

You may want to start collecting items such as play foods, animal figures, clothing, dolls and other objects that you may buy in novelty stores. Keep in mind that parents and children may also help you find pictures and objects that go with the different themes. Make sure you store the items according to the corresponding theme.

Use natural ways to provide comprehensible input such as gestures, body movements, actions, facial expressions, emotions, vocal intonation, drawings and pictures.

You can very often get your meaning across by your tone of voice and your body language.

Adding visual and kinesthetic support to your speech gives more meaning to your words and enhances the development of the language.

Use a variety of musical activities, songs, nursery rhymes, and finger plays to build up and reinforce vocabulary in a way that makes it easy for children to follow along. Even though, young children may not understand everything that is said, they will be learning many words that will form the basis for the target language later on.

Sing with children. This can be a fun and valuable experience. You do not need to sound like a professional singer. As long as you are enthusiastic, young children will enjoy it, and as they grow they will want to sing along.

Music is a socially engaging way to learn and especially appropriate for the developmental levels of young children.

Pair music with movement or visual aids to stimulate children’s senses.

Provide opportunities for children to play. Games, acting out, role playing and movement activities help children in your class interact with the target language in many ways. As we all know, play is a child’s work. It helps enhance children’s language and literacy skills, in addition to supporting cognitive and socio-emotional development. Through play children gain a sense of competence, develop their imaginations and their creativity.

Use Total Physical Response (TPR) a technique that is based on the natural way that children learn their native language.

During the first months of life, children take in all the sounds and patterns of the language through conversations with their parents and caregivers. In these conversations, parents and caregivers are continuously using their “language-body” and giving instructions to their children. Children respond physically until they have decoded enough to reproduce the language quite spontaneously. Mirror this effect in classes through the use of TPR. It is a lot of fun! Young children enjoy it, and it can be a real stirrer in a class. In conjunction with the other methods and techniques presented, TPR can be a successful and fun way of changing the dynamics and pace of a lesson.

These scaffolding techniques support children’s early acquisition of the target language.

And most importantly HAVE FUN, BE NATURAL and MAKE IT FUN for the children in your class.

Using puppets in your classes

Puppets can become an essential tool for teaching very young children a new language.

Puppets provide an essential link between learning and play which makes them a wonderful teaching tool.

You can use puppets for initiating a class, for introducing vocabulary, for helping shy children relax and participate, for drilling exercises, for teaching manners and appropriate ways of behaving, for helping children express their feelings and many more.

When you use puppets in your class use different voices and gestures to act out as you talk to promote understanding.

Puppets are both entertaining and captivating.

Young children can believe and relate to them and as they enter the fascinating inventive world that puppets create they learn without noticing it.

Learning in this way is more likely to be remembered and to become part of children’s growing knowledge. Puppets really engage and delight children.

 

Reading to very young learners is an effective and enjoyable way to expose them to a foreign language. Children of all ages love to be read to.

When you read out loud, you are teaching about communication, and helping young children build their listening and memory skills. You are giving them information about the world. You are introducing them to concepts and vocabulary in a fun way, and you are helping them develop skills in the target language by imitating sounds, recognizing images, and learning words. Moreover, children will not just “learn” the words, they will immediately see how the words are used and hear them in a meaningful context. This is so much more beneficial to the children in your group than simply memorizing a list of words.

Stories are perfect for teaching young EFL/ESL learners because children already love stories and are already motivated at the thought of listening to one.

Reading invites children to look, point, touch, and answer questions — all of which promote social development and thinking skills.

Stories play a crucial role in children’s language-learning, not only because of children’s natural interest in stories, or their appeal to their imagination, but also because stories embody

a narrative structure of discourse which can be useful for

learning more in general.

In your classes Story Time can be an important tool for providing a basis for the development of the target language.

Helpful suggestions for conducting Story Time:

¨      Let children predict Story Time by inviting them to help you set the story blanket.

¨      Help everyone find a comfortable space.

¨      Make sure everyone can see the book.

¨      Present the book with lots of enthusiasm.

¨      Read the title and author.

¨      Talk about the pictures on the front page.

¨      Make sure you look both at the book and the children.

¨      Read slowly and clearly.

¨      Read with expression, open your eyes wide, look surprised and smile.

¨      Use your voice in many ways, pitching it higher or lower, or using different voices and talking excitedly to catch

children’s attention and making the story more interesting.

¨      Use different gestures and motions to keep children interested.

¨      Focus on the illustrations and emphasize the rhythms and rhyming words as you read.

¨      Invite parents and their children to participate by filling in words, using expressive voices, answering easy, basic questions, pretending and role playing.

¨      Invite children to anticipate each page by using a “wonder, what’s next” look on your face.

¨      Ask for understanding as you read the stories. Look for signs that show comprehension, such as a nod or a comment.

¨      Try to present the selections chosen in a different way each time you read them.

¨      Allow your creativity to show through. Make animal sounds, change your voice, sing little songs and, most of all, use gestures. Have fun and invite children to imitate you and have fun as well.

¨      Teach them a song that goes along with the theme of the story.

¨      Teach them actions to go along with the songs.

¨      Let them act out parts of the story.

¨      Provide props and outfits that encourage them to dress up like characters in the story and do things the characters in the story did. So, if the characters in the story decorated cookies, give them some time to decorate cookies.

¨      Have the students draw a picture about their favorite part of the story. Have them show it to the class during

“show and tell.”

¨      Read the same stories over and over again.

When we are working with little ones Story Time becomes an essential component of each of your lessons.

Reading to children lays the foundation for a love of reading throughout their lives.

In your classes, it contributes in a particularly unique way to the development of the target language, whether it is Spanish or English.

Reading fosters vocabulary development and helps children learn about times, cultures, and people other than their own; it helps them learn about the world and understand how others think, act, and feel.

In addition, the repetition of the stories selected which by the way all young children love, gives them and their parents the opportunity to hear the words and structures of the target language over and over again and become familiar with them.

When you set a time for reading aloud to children in all classes this helps them predict what is coming next. In this way you are not only helping them settle down and enjoy a pleasurable experience, but you are giving them a sense of security.

Get ready for the new school year

We are at the beginning of a new school year and parents and children are busy shopping for school supplies and clothing and teachers are getting ready to welcome their new group of children.

Teachers are busy planning activities for the first days of school. These activities will be geared at helping students get to know each another, exploring the classroom and the materials around, coming up as a group with classroom rules, establishing routines and taking notes of the strengths and needs of each child.

There are many ways of providing activities to reach your goals but one important thing to keep in mind is to make the activities fun and enjoyable!

For very young children the beginning of the school year is loaded with new experiences. Therefore, we need to help them settle into the daily routines and the classroom environment so they can feel comfortable and safe.

The whole environment needs to be simple, with a few number of manipulatives, materials, posters and learning centers. In this way children will be less distracted, may attend more easily and may have the opportunity to absorb the new experiences little by little. Again, keep it simple! You have a whole year to add new and/or different materials, posters, and decorations to your classroom according to the seasons and the thematic units planned.

You may want to provide children with simple and familiar activities, such as songs, short stories, self-directed activities, movement and arts and crafts activities.

Take the first days of school to introduce, model, practice and constantly reinforce procedures, rules and routines. Remember that repetition is a major factor in learning. Set the tone for your class and have a great start!

It is extremely important to get parents involved.

It is my  belief that the parents’ role in the process of a child’s language acquisition at a young age is indispensable. Parents are the most important people in children’s lives and their best teachers.

 

Languages4kidz believes that it is crucial to invite parents to participate actively in their children’s learning and development, while learning the target language themselves. Through our program parents learn easy vocabulary that they can use with their children at home, simple structures they can put into practice when talking to their children, songs, nursery rhymes and fingerplays in the target language and they can learn how to carry out activities that will benefit their children’s overall development such as, early stimulation exercises, movement and dancing, arts and crafts and reading aloud.

Languages4kidz materials help parents and their babies practise the target language together, whether it is Spanish or English. Parents will find simple stories, rhymes and games that they can learn to help them introduce the target language to their baby or toddler and continue the teaching-learning process at home.

We like to encourage mothers, who while taking care of their children at home very often don’t have many chances of learning a new language; and we provide an equal opportunity for fathers to actively participate in their child’s early stages of development.

When parents learn a new language together with their children, the whole experience helps develop a possitive attitude towards the target language for both. It helps parents lose their language barriers and learn Spanish or English in an informal way, while they spend quality time with their children. At the same time it may encourage parents to continue studying the language individually which may lead then to their own personal development and introduction in the labor force.

Teaching with songs is an amazing tool for helping young children acquire a new language.

Singing with children can be a fun and valuable experience. When you sing with young children, you can adjust the speed and volume to fit their abilities. You don’t need to sound like a professional singer. As long as you are enthusiastic, young children will enjoy it, and want to sing along.

Young learners pick up vocabulary, grammatical structures, and the rhythm of the language simply by doing what we all love to do…singing songs.

Languages4kidz uses familiar songs and melodies, finger plays and nursery rhymes that have been passed down from one generation to the next. Some have been adapted for Languages4kidz units to foster the development of children’s skills in the target language. Others have been created to enlighten vocabulary that are an important part of children’s lives, such as people (family members, teachers, friends), objects (clothing, furniture, cars, bikes), daily rituals (brushing teeth, bedtime), and special events (holidays, going on a field trip).

In Languages4kidz lesson plans music functions in a variety of ways. It helps teachers create a safe and comfortable environment, establish routines, signal transitions, create bonding experiences or teach vocabulary.

Following are some ways in which you can use music and teach with songs in your classes:

• · Welcome children with songs.
• · Begin your lesson with a welcoming song like “Sing Hello”.
• · Chant a song or play music to signal transitions.
• · Play music to manage the energy level of the class.
• · Play music to introduce new language or to review vocabulary already introduced.
• · Introduce songs with gestures.
• · Encourage children to sing and dance.
• · Choose songs to enhance your story time.
• · Last but not least wrap up your classes by singing a Good-bye song.

Music is a powerful learning tool. It is not only a great way to introduce new vocabulary, but it can also contribute to children’s progress and learning in many different areas. Music supports self-expression, cooperative play, creativity, emotional well-being, and development of social, cognitive, communication, and motor skills. Music and singing are a fun and effective way to help young children learn.

I encourage you to use music and lots of songs in your classes. It will make your classroom a warmer, more effective learning environment.