Strategies to teach very young learners
(preschoolers and first graders)
This school year I have been working with very young children both in my school internships and in my own English lessons. On the one hand, in the school I taught 1st graders mostly and on the other, my English lessons were encompassed by 5-year-old students. Therefore, it can be said that I have acquired some experience in this issue.
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Thanks to all these teaching experiences, I can say that when teaching such young children there are several aspects that must be taken into account. First of all, they are still learning to write and read in their mother tongue, so writing expression and reading comprehension activities in English must be very limited, basic and adapted to their needs. In addition to this, there is a big necessity of scaffolding very precisely the reading activities with visual support to facilitate the comprehension in the foreign language.
It is thought that students this young are like “sponges” when learning a new language and this has lead me to focus my English lessons on oral communication, speaking and above all, listening. One of the strategies that I follow most is to speak slow, clear, with simple sentences and always gestualizing. In English teaching, our main goal is to be understood by the pupils when speaking, and that is why it is very important to make yourself clear and even more if the students are this young. In addition, the adequate and non-monotonous tone of the teacher’s speech plays a very important role to catch the students attention.
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Furthermore, as John Dewey states, children learn better by doing and experimenting and so, in most of my lessons I focus on doing hands-on activities, games and also cooking. In my point of view, teaching through arts and crafts, games and cooking is a very useful strategy since it motivates children and they use English with a purpose and within a rich communicative atmosphere. When my students do hands-on activities, they know that if they need a colour they must ask Can I have a….., please? or if they need help “Laura, can you help me?”, not to mention that they acquire and apply the basic vocabulary of colors and materials. While they play games they are asked to say key sentences such as”it is my/your turn” or “I am the winner”. In the cooking activities, they mostly learn about food and cooking verbs. Therefore, this way, English is always actively present.
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What it is more, I use a lot the Total Physical Response technique. In some cases, I attribute one move or gesture to a specific concept that we are working on and students learn it more rapidly. In fact, when we review the main vocabulary, I can observe that they remember some words thanks to the movements. Linked to this motor learning, I make use of dance-a-long songs as well and children really enjoy them.
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To end with, storytelling is one of my favorite strategies. Very young children love picture books and listening to stories. A good way to make use of these books is always through some drama, for instance, shifting the tone of voice and doing facial expressions while telling the story. Also, it is important that for early ages we choose carefully a picture book that is simple and perhaps with a repetitive text so that children can easily interiorize the main vocabulary and grammar structure.
As a whole, I believe the strategies that benefit most the English learning for young children must be very dynamic and focused on making English enjoyable.
visual support
Speaking slow, clear and with gestures
learning by doing
TPR
story-telling
innovation in the classroom
As we all know, society is always in constant change and so does our education. Thus, it is teachers’ aim to adapt to these news changes and be innovative in our classrooms. Indeed, the teacher’s profession requires a life long learning and training in order to be updated of the new educational tendencies and to innovate our methodologies and adapting thus better to the needs and interests of our students and society.
Nowadays, there is more and more innovation regarding new educational methodologies. A lot of centers opt for working by projects or “Ambients”, instead of defending the traditional-book lessons in which the students have a passive learning role. These new educational perspectives suggest that education should be student-centered and so, students are autonomously and actively engaged in their learning process. What is more, something that I really like is that these methodologies take as a base the students’ interests and have as an aim to infuse passion into learning.
In the last two internships, I have been able to experience this innovative vision of education, working by Ambients, and I believe it is a very good philosophy. It is true that in the last school I have been things hanged in the balance and there was a lack of organization among the personal staff. However, I completely defend this kind of teaching. In my opinion, centers that follow these methodologies must have a structured organization and better communication among teachers and have very motivated teachers who enjoy teaching and most importantly, that also believe in this kind of education. Sometimes I compare it to my childhood education and I wonder what would have happened if I had gone to schools like these ones. Apart from working by Ambients, in some of these schools students take lessons of cooking, sewing and robotics, which I find it amazing and very innovative.
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Another interesting point to talk about are new technologies. It is an obvious thing that we live in a technological era and as teachers we have to take profit of that and give technologies an educational value. It is incredibly surprising the infinity of useful technological resources that have been created throughout the last few decades and that are beneficial for our classrooms. These new resources allow teachers to use other ways of assessment, avoiding thus the need of doing always exams; to organize themselves better; to motivate students with learning games; to foster the students creativity; to develop the students’ autonomy, and so many other benefits. Besides, among these new technological tendencies we can highlight also Robotics and Coding, which have been introduced quite recently into education and reveal very positive results.
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