Some of my English classes go super easy and are super fun for both the students and the teacher. Others classes still completely elude me after two months teaching!
What works: I love working with the 1st and 2nd graders. They are quick enough to engage in games, understand we are all there to learn English, and want to challenge themselves. They’re not so smart that you have to make things complicated, and it never occurs to them to be embarrassed.
House poster I use to review house vocabulary with the 2nd grade.
With the 1st and 2nd graders, we do a lot of flashcards, memory cards, working with real objects, hiding games, charades, and the like. I made house flashcards and an empty house poster so that when we review house vocabulary I can invite them up to the board one at a time to decide where the different rooms should go in the house. We hide objects representing new vocabulary words around the room and play “hot and cold” using the object names. We shout, sing and dance.
The pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children love my puppets, songs, and colorful materials for teaching vocabulary. I love seeing their faces light up when I walk in the room or pull out an animal cut-out. Singing with them is the best.
Animal cut-outs I made for teaching farm animals.
What’s most challenging: The most successful part of my pre-kinder and kindergarten lessons is usually the first 3 minutes, before I lose their attention and focus– or at least the attention and focus of the most rambunctious members of the class making it hard to keep on track.
Really cool horse colored by one of my kindergarteners.
Striking a balance with how to lead large groups of 4- to 5-year-olds is a huge challenge. They say that no activity should be longer than 5 minutes because the children lose their focus so easily. But then again, they take so long to do anything at that age. So the activities need to be incredibly simple but also interesting enough to keep their attention! Every week I am learning a little bit more how to do this.
Luckily, the pre-kindergarteners and kindergarteners are not under a lot of pressure to learn English right away – as long as I keep them singing, laughing and listening to English all year that will make a huge difference in their language learning in the future. In the meantime, I will also be getting better at understanding the Spanish of 5-year-olds : )
My pre-Kinder class and me with our farm animals poster.
Learning in Chilean Patagonia 