Job Discussion Forums

[necrogodomega]

I'm in a pre-school and they headmaster wants me to tell her how many words and sentences I can get the students to learn each week. I've been here for 7 months so far and she didn't ask before. I'm just curious what is considered reasonable?

I picked 10 vocab and 6 sentences. My students are about 5-7 (4-6 in American counting). I'm sure I can get that much since they are used to me, but should I try more or perhaps less?

[The_Messenger]

I worked part-time in a private kindergarten. The pupils were learning 3 or four words per day. I guess therefore it depends on how many classes you teach but a dozen words and half a dozen sentence patterns should be ample.

[kev7161]

My kids are a little ahead of yours (2nd grade), but each week sees a spelling list of 10 "new" words (sometimes not new as they are refreshers depending on what long or short vowel we are learning or consonant clusters or whatever), then 4 "mastery" words (words they should all know already) and six "bonus" words - - really new words that can be more challenging. In the course of the week, we learn the meanings of these words through actions and pictures and, of course, how to use them properly in sentences. Their weekly spelling test consists of spelling 15 of these words, listening to a sentnece from me and writing it, and then thinking of their own sentence using two of their spelling words. Of course, most of them might stumble from time to time, but a majority of my students pass their tests with a score of anywhere from 80% to 100%

Remember, it seems to be that the younger they are, the more quickly they can absorb the language!

[necrogodomega]

Cool. I was pretty sure they could meet the numbers I said, but it's nice to see that I could push 'em a little harder if I (or the headmaster) wants. We only have 20-25 min classes, so sometimes I worry if they are actually getting enough exposer to it al.

[Steppenwolf]

The question asked by your schoolmaster is plain dumb and shows this kindergarten is not operating with the children's best interests on their mind.
I worked in a kindergarten and had more freedom than you seem to be enjoying; in year 2 I heard that parents were enquiring about the number of new words their kid was learning. I established a list of what we had covered over the past year; it wasn't an impressive number - maybe 300, 400, but it was very useful as the kids learnt not just words but how to use them appropriately, i.e. verbs that agreed with the subject the kid would use, even tenses, so in purely phonetic terms, my kids learnt somewhere between 2000 and 2500 vocables (if you accept that 'be', 'am', 'are', 'is' are four vocables).

Another question would be: how do you TEST the kids' mastery of those vocables? Do you use them in DIALOGUES, or do you ask them TO WRITE and READ them?

[englishgibson]

3 or 4 words is good for those little ones and then 5 or 6 for the rest of students, scientifically...i mean many researchers claim that a human brain is capable of accepting as much as that

there surely are some different ways of understanding "how many words to learn"...however and i mean really learn....when you can use the word in a sentence well and understand it

peace to all theories
and
cheers and beers to our forums

[no_exit]

I too wonder if the kids are really learning how to use the words (like EG says, using them in sentences interchangeably) or just memorizing them. 10 words per week might not be a bad goal, but 5-6 sentences sounds like a bit much to me, that is, if you're truly aiming for comprehension and not memorization. Kids memorize things very quickly, but they take a bit longer to understand what they're learning than older students do. Have you come across students who know the numbers 1-10, or the alphabet A-Z, but only in the correct order. Write a "6" on the board and see how many can recognize it without the familiar context of 6 coming after 5 and before 7 and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about. To make sure your kids are really learning what you're presenting, you need to make sure that your lessons build upon each other. You shouldn't be focused on 6 new sentences per week, but rather on building upon the sentences they've already learned. If they learned "how many" one lesson and "have" the next, then after that you can put the two together and for "how many books do you have?" or "How many brothers do you have?"

I might be in the minority here, but I see lots of teachers who try to cram too much into kindergarten lessons in too short a time. Their teacher needs to understand it isn't about quantity, how many words they can learn, but quality, how they use the words they know.

[necrogodomega]

Well everyone has great points. I agree with both points of view here, but unfortunatly it's not really in my control. I picked the numbers that I knew I could at least get the kids to memorize. It's not what I started with 6 months ago, but now the headmaster seems to really want this over the actual understanding.

And you're quite right about how you can put a number on the board that isn't in the 1-10 flow and most students don't know it. But the previous teachers didn't seem to stress that on the school, as long as the students could repeat what was said.

I'll try to see if I can get a decent balance of just memorization and actual understanding. Thanks for all the advice.