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.
Tags: esl preschool, esl, teaching vocab

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