Teacher Discussion Forums

i'm moving this over from the elementary forum....

to answer questions, i'm not is nursery nursing, nor even in teaching at all.
usually, my main nursery class is 12 2 year olds, with me and one assistant. the school is growing and opening a new nursery class soon, but the new teacher hasn't come yet, so now i've got 16 kids and 2 assistants. i expect things to be back to normal come may.
in the afternoons i also teach "mommy and me" classes with infants as young as 9 months old. that is sometimes a challenge because i can't always be as silly with the mom's there as i am when it's just me and my kids. and sometimes i feel a bit of competetiveness from the mothers, which is rough when they're comparing their 1 year old to a 2+ year old child.
i have many resources available to me...flashcards, toys, games, stories, teacher-books. but i find that there's a real lack of material written about teaching esl to students that are this young. a lot of our resources have ideas that are great, but are for slightly older kids. and a lot of our resources are geared towards kindergarten teaching in a native speaking classroom, since by age 4, most of our students are fairly fluent, and i'd even say better at reading/writing than many native speaking students.

my basic lesson-time activities remain probably 80% the same each day. i do a lot of singing, and repetition (e.g. every day we look at different types of weather, and then talk about what the weather is today)

but i'd love to hear other ideas of what to do.
love,
shannon

I am curious to know why you feel that you cant be as silly with the mothers present? My ideas for children as young as 1 or 2 is just to play games develop thier listening for simple commands, such as sit down come here go back stand up. Also you can include certain actions like jump crawl etc.. Even for the bit older kids they still enjoy these simple commands, and usually I make a game out of it. Games that I have made are come here but you must....(fill in with an action walk crawl jump etc), as well as go to the picture, same way as before. The kids also enjoy when you tell them quickly to do the actions, such as stand up sit down stand up, stand up. If the kids sit down then I make a funny face at them. I hope these can be helpful, I am still developing many more ideas.