teaching english to lil cuties--esl tips, tricks, and stories

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

find *your* voice

i think i mentioned before that i have a little puppet that i use to do short conversation with the kids. my puppet is a pink rabbit named yippee skippy. yippee's voice is high pitched and he squeals and jumps around whenever kids speak or especially say the right answer.
awhile ago i was training a new nursery teacher and she liked that idea and wanted to incorporate it into her lessons. problem was, she has a much lower natural voice than i do and so it was really straining her voice to speak all high pitched.
then one day in her classroom i noticed a really cool looking dinosaur. i picked it up and was like "wow! this is a puppet!" her eyes lit up and she said "oh my god. this is the one!"
point here--i'm a pink bunny and she is not. she was trying to go with a character that was against her nature and she was hurting her voice and it wasn't that effective with the kids. so if you're going to use a puppet, try picking a puppet that goes with your personality. it will make things easier on you, and be more realistic to the kids.
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Thursday, June 15, 2006

making sure everyone gets a turn

when working with young kids, it's very important that you are making sure that everyone gets a turn. there are few things worse than the look on a child's face when you're finishing up an activity and they still haven't had a turn.
often with many activities during class time, there's enough time to make sure that every child gets a turn. for example, i always make sure that each child gets a chance to count out 10 objects, or to pick a card from the stack and tell me what it is.
but i have a two activities a day where it's impossible for every child to have a turn. when we do weather, i have a little weather board and we put on a sticker that says "today is..." onto the type of weather that we're having that day. and when we sing the ABC song, i have a cute little star pointer that i use to point to the ABCs. since the song repeats, i always pass my pointer on to a child and let them be the teacher for that round of the song.
i've started keeping a little list by my lesson planner. i've got a column for weather and ABCs with a list of all of my students' names under it. as each child gets a turn doing one thing, i cross their name off. i try to plan it so that i cross off each students name in one activity, before i move on to letting them do the other activity.
this ensures that every child gets a turn to do both and i'm not just always calling on the students who are most actively saying that they want to do it. Tags: ,


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Monday, June 12, 2006

surprisingly simple idea

back before i was teaching the preschool, i was teaching at a kids' eikaiwa, or english conversation school. it was a pretty good gig, but the problem is that i would see each kid once a month for an hour. i'd rotate among 4 schools and the other 3 weeks of the month, the students would have an english speaking japanese instructor. needless to say, the kids were not very good at english. and they often were not very well behaved and i was on my own in the school.
i had this one class that was the class from hell. i think 12 kids ages 3-6. they would come in and just run around the room and climb all over me. never listened to what i was saying. i couldn't get them to do barely anything.
in my training, we were told that if you have a very active class, you should try to play very active games to get their attention. i tried that with this class and failed every time.
imagine my surprise when this happened:
the vocabulary for the month was fruits and the sentence structure was "i like/i don't like..." i took out the main teacher's poster for like/don't like and started teaching the kids "i like apples. i like bananas" immediately they all sat down and started doing this thing with their hand. they would make a circle with their hand during the "i like" part then point to the vocab card when we said the word.
amazing. after all the game prep i had done for this class, it was something as simple as a hand gesture with vocab drilling that actually settled them down.
i'm now teaching some simple sentence structures to my 2 year olds and i always incorporate hand gestures with it.
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Wednesday, June 07, 2006

june's monthly songs

trying to keep up to date on this. here are the songs that we're doing for the month of june:
*the muffin man--walking around in a circle, then going in and out.
*heads, shoulders, knees and toes
*the freeze--great song that's dance-y and then has parts where the music stops and everyone freezes
*bingo
*you are my sunshine

the you are my sunshine one is pretty funny. i picked it because michi has been acting like it's one of his favorites. but the version that i picked has the second verse to it that goes:
"the other night, dear, while i was sleeping, i dreamt i held you in my arms. when i awoke though i was mistaken, so i hung, my head and cried."
and then of course i put my head down and do a big fake cry.
but turns out that tomo, one of the cutest lil girls who is always happy, is extremely empathetic. when i do this fake crying thing, she busts out into real tears because she can't handle the fact that i'm crying. it's really hard to get around this. especially since i think it's kind of funny.
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Sunday, June 04, 2006

classroom management: what gets their attention?

there's going to come a time (probably many) in your teaching career where you're faced with a room full of kids who are talking among themselves and have absolutely no desire to pay any attention to you. what do you do?
you need a signal which the kids understand as "you're too noisy and it's time to pay attention to the teacher.". when first trying out a new signal, it's important to have the cooperation of your assistant or other adults in the room, so that the children will begin to learn what the appropriate response to your action is.
however, i've found that it only takes a couple of times for children to learn that <whatever your action is> means quiet time.
here are a few ideas that i've either used or read about:
*sing a part of a song that the kids know which involves being quiet. we used to use a song that had the lyrics "hands in the air. rock-a-bye your bear. bear's now asleep. shh shh shh. bear's now asleep. shh shh shh." (and we'd keep repeating the "bear's now asleep. shh shh shh." getting quieter and quieter until the kids were quiet.
*flip the lights on and off
*count down 5-4-3-2-1 shhhhh.
*do something that involves a call and response. this is my current favorite. i put my hands on my head and say "OH-AY-OH" in a sing-songy voice. kids know that they must copy me. then next time i might say "OO-AY-OO". and repeat as necessary until they become quiet. as they've pretty much gotten quiet, i then try to say something silly that they have to repeat.
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Thursday, June 01, 2006

on timing

timing your lessons just right is an art form. you'd hate to find yourself with 15 minutes left in the lesson and nothing left to do. it's always best to have a few extra things on hand in case your initial ideas flop, but once you get the hang of it, things should come easy.
when you're new, i suggest actually writing down what you're going to do and how long you plan to spend doing it. your lesson plan may look something like this:
*introduction to the class/greetings/short conversation/attendance (10 minutes)
*daily review (e.g. weather, days of the week, ABCs, counting, etc.) (5 min)
*first concept. depending on the level, this could be something as simple as a set of vocabulary or more difficult such as a particular grammar concept. (5 min teaching/10 min game to reinforce/practice the concept)
*second concept. same as above.
*closing--a goodbye song, rewards for good behavior, whatever works for you (3 min)
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