Young Learner Ideas

The difficulty of keeping control of 3-year-olds who haven’t learnt what working together means yet, or 5-year-olds who have learnt how much fun it is to change the words of every song and the pronunciation of every word, is difficult enough; but many of us teachers of English in kindergartens have to do so without any special training, in countries where the kinds of discipline we remember from back home are unheard of, working for companies that encourage us to use teaching methods that get the kids overexcited, and/ or where we are not allowed or not able to resort to the kids’ language to keep order. In such situations, discipline techniques like those described below that get their attention without making them cry and without taking your attention away from the rest of the class are invaluable. These are not in any particular order, but you will probably want to plan which you will use for minor or first misdemeanors, and which will be kept for making your displeasure very clear indeed. Please note that rewards are just as important in (more…)

Choosing a good worksheet is even more difficult for pre-school age students than for other children and adults, as they are not only more likely to find a bad worksheet boring but might also be totally unable to write, draw or read what you what them to. Here are some tips that should (more…)

These stages can be used to introduce the use of songs in your pre-school classes for the first time (especially useful if you are not used to using them) or as the stages to use with a particular song that is new to you and/ or your class so that you can introduce a song easily and use it as long as you need to. Please note that with slower or younger classes (more…)

1. Colour anyhow
Very young children will colour a picture without paying any attention to the colour of the real thing it represents nor to the lines that are supposed to mark its limits. As these things will develop naturally with the help of practice in their other classes, there is no need to push for these two things but you can help reach the other stages quicker and add more language by giving (more…)

Personalization (making sure students can use the language to talk about themselves) is commonly accepted as a vital part of language learning, but it is one that often gets lost with low level classes or when the students are far away from the teacher in age and so chatting about themselves is not straightforward. It is, however, precisely in low level and very young classes that students most need (more…)

1. Memorable
For children who can’t yet read in English and don’t live in English speaking countries, singing English songs to themselves is about the only practice they can get outside class without the help of their parents. Ways of making this happen include using a song with a catchy tune, using a seasonal (more…)

“Cooler” activities and techniques like these below can be good for classes who tend to lose concentration and/ or get injured when they get overexcited, to change pace when there has been something like someone crying that interrupted a previous activity, to let them get their energy back before the next active stage, and/ or to give the quieter students a chance to (more…)

If you have a large class of pre-school aged kids, for example 45 three-year-olds, you can have the problem that not only do the games that work with older ages not work, but neither do the ones that work with smaller classes. Do not despair! Rather than throwing away (more…)

Although movement and fun are two important elements you should try to put into every kindergarten English class, sometimes you will need sit down activities like these below to calm students down, regain discipline and/ or let the teacher get his or her energy back. These activities are also useful for kindergartens where the policy is not to allow too much (more…)

These ideas are designed to work with every kind of kindergarten class, including typical problem classes such as large classes, classes that can’t move around, mixed level classes, classes with very low level students, classes that study very little English and classes with short attention spans (more…)