Job Discussion Forums

[FemaleNomad]

Hi everyone,
I�m going to be teaching kids that are 4 and 5 years old starting this October. There are 12 kids in class and they are in school with me 7 hours a day. This is in a middle to upperclass neighborhood outside of Warsaw, Poland. That being said... any suggestions for what to do on the first day? Any good games, songs, etc. that you know that would be good fillers throughout the day? Any good websites I can check out for printouts, songs, games, etc? Any advice would be appreciated. On a side note, they will be following a set curriculum from the English National syllabus.

Thank you, as always, for your help.

Karolina.

[ddeubel]

I would start with lots of song. Karaoke works wonders and look at my kids karaoke. You need the karafun player. Then download my songs and bang....it is great . Teaches phonics along with the song... Go to the batcave link below and click Kids Karaoke. Explains how to set up your classroom.

Lots more to relate and I have tons of ppts for young learners, a great nursery rhyme selection (all the best). Available to members at our community below. I also have tons of stories in the booknook, free to all. Check it out. Also check out the EFL Classroom buzka of links there.

DD
http://eflclassroom.ning.com
www.ddd.batcave.net

[Sgt Killjoy]

If you're still in the states, I'd go to the library and check out some good children music cds. You either use them for ideas and then do a rush order at Amazon for them or just rip them to mp3 and take them along.

You might want to pick up a few good Sesame Street videos to keep the kids interested and give them exposure to English.

[Deicide]

[Joeys ESL Room]

Here's a list of books that you could look into to get you started

http://www.joeysesl.com/teacher-ideas/408/esl-books-for-new-esl-teachers/

[QatarChic]

When I taught 5-6 year olds I found these sites useful:

http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-topics.htm
http://bogglesworldesl.com/

Lots of downloadable stuff here as well.

I used to do lots of story telling as well as songs. I had great fun teaching this age group and would love to do it again. The secret is having lots of short activities, as their concentration span is shorter compared to adults. Make sure you also have a mix of 'settling' and 'stirring' activities

[Sonnet]

If you ignore the whining/argumentative posts (par for the course for the China forum, sadly...), there's quite a lot of good advice for teaching Early Learners in this thread:

http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=55859

[lionheartuk]

This is a good site for downloading books and songs for teaching all learners of English. There are some good audio files which you can use as singalong activities. www.englishtips.org .You have to register andto read the site you need to click on the English flag otherwise everything will be in Russian.

[mcsam]

If you are using the English National Curriculum try this link

www.nc.uk.net

I looked at it before it was revised and it had a lot of good ideas not sure what it is like now.

My other favorites for craft, songs, maths and science ideas that are topic related are

www.preschooleducation.com

www.firstschool.com

Good advice said by a previous poster:

Keep it short
If it isn't working i.e your kids are becoming fractious/poking their friends and generally not engaged. Ditch it and move on. Don't flog a dead horse it will only end in tears, probably yours.

I teach 45 minute lessons in the State System in the U.A.E. and I found a good rule is
5 - 10 minutes for a starter - introduce/revise the language, play a game with the language, do a drill (not popular I know but I drill my kids using diferent tones/loud and soft etc) but keep it short. Show, don't just try to explain, the kids what the main activity is and what you expect them to achieve.
20 - 25 minutes for the main teaching activity/activities if they are short
5 - 10 minutes for a review of the language/learning intention

I have also found a good behaviour management system (not my idea and might not work for everyone) is to have 3 faces. One with a big smile, one with a straight line for a mouth
and one with a sad face. I made pegs for my kids with all their names on and at the start of every day everyones peg is on the smiley face, if/when a child is misbehaving the peg gets moved down to the so-so face if the child then complies with what you want the peg gets moved back up to the smiley face but if they misbehave again it gets moved down to the sad face if they misbehave again they get a time out. I usually give one minute for each year old. So if the child is 5 = 5 mins. They are then returned to the group and the peg goes up to the smiley face to begin again. It might sound mean but it works for me as it's playing on the childs need to please the teacher.

I think the most imprtant thing to remember is make it fun!

Good luck! Teaching young children can be very challenging but also very rewarding.