Pls. suggest good ESL textbooks for children ...

[Dona Karla]

Hi there - I am an ESL teacher located in the Brazilian Amazon who has been teaching adults for the past several years. Recently, I have had a lot of requests to teach the children of my students and I hope to start this in the very near future. Could anyone suggest a useful textbook to use as a base??? People here really, really like textbooks ...

Also, any advice would be appreciated - as I mentioned previously, my experience is with adults only and I have been using the New Interchange Series (along with materials I have developed) with them.

Thanks in advance!

Regards,
Dona Karla

[Sally Olsen]

I am amazed that you have the funds to get textbooks. The children I visited there had no books, no pencils, no blackboards and the teachers were paid $5 a day. If you have the funds, I would suggest Let's Go - the picture dictionary or any other picture dictionary. Build up stories from the pictures and enhance them with pictures of your own about similar subjects to make small books for the children to read and contribute to an English library.

[Dona Karla]

I am amazed that you have the funds to get textbooks. The children I visited there had no books, no pencils, no blackboards and the teachers were paid $5 a day. If you have the funds, I would suggest Let's Go - the picture dictionary or any other picture dictionary. Build up stories from the pictures and enhance them with pictures of your own about similar subjects to make small books for the children to read and contribute to an English library.

Hi Sally - thanks for the great advice. Actually, I brought the books with me when I immigrated from Canada - I came prepared - for adults, anyway! I hold classes in my home and fortunately, it pays more than R$5 a day . I am enjoying it very much and have met a lot of great people.

Best regards,
DK

[Sally Olsen]

The people I met there are in my heart always as well. I am glad that you are making more than $5 a day. If you have to give homework, you can put the words of the theme that is developed in the picture dictionary in a small booklet. We called ours a Passport to English. The children practice the ten or so words at home with parents (you can add translation or put in pictures) and we developed a number of games so that they could practice the words and even timed them so they could say the words quickly. The next lesson, they got a star for saying all the words correctly. They got stamps in their passports for ten papers or so. We eventually developed it into going to different countries and games to play while visiting there.

[Sally Olsen]

I just found all my slides from visiting the Amazon and some people have asked me to give a workshop for interested seniors. What is the situation like there today? I went in the 80's and took the boat up the river to Iquitos stopping in little settlements along the way.

[Stefanie]

I am teaching English in third and fourth grade using "Textbooks". In Germany, each state took on English as a subject in Elementary schools within the past 5 years - so now a huge market of textbooks has developed.

I am not so sure how you can get a hold of textbooks printed in Germany (and Austria) in Brazil, but I suggest Amazon.

I use (and love it) a program named "Rainbow Playway" 3 or 4, depending on the grade. They are cool. Have a lot of comics and pictures and there is a whole lot of extras involved. You can only use them with the according CD's, but it gives you songs and stories, poems and all that kind of stuff. There is also a Video cassette and picture cards and word cards and story cards and even "Show what you know" - a book full of fun exams. It is all in English, all instructions and everything from the first page on.

There is also another form (not the Rainbow edition, named only Playway) which is designed for those states who start in English in first grade, not in third. I haven't really seen that, but I guess it doesn't start with reading too soon and so on.

This program is loved by all kids, but parents have reservations as does not at all resemble their old textbooks. If you prefer a textbook (not colored, more textbook style) I suggest a book named "English - What fun". I use some of the pages sometimes as a way of practicing the old way. Unfortunately, I am not positive if all instructions are in English and I don't have recent access to the book.

As we teach English very actively, this last book has come very much out of fashion. I could talk on and on about Playway, but I will do that only if anyone is interested.

During my personal teacher-education I also did a little kids group in learning English. It was a group of about a dozen 3-6 year olds. I used storybooks (I really liked the Little Critter series by Mercer Mayer and those Classical Dr. Seuss books and Barney books and this kind of stuff) though where I read the story and the kids loved seeing the pictures. Sometimes they liked guessing (in German) what would happen next or like the rhymes and so on.

Also, I did a lot of babysitting for a friend and her boys LOVED all Arthur books. They persuaded their mother in getting them all, too because my bringing them along just wasn't enough for them.

Hope all that was helpful...

[eslbiz]

My experience teaching ESL is that parents and school directors love textbooks because they are a tangeable measurement of progress - or so they think (I believe it is an erroneous assumption). What I try to do, whenever my school lets me, is get the kids outside, *out* of the classroom. It's not always easy but I recommend getting noses out of books and into the real world of the senses - particularly scent and touch. Kids love it and adults too if given a chance to learn literally in the field. Perhaps this touchy-feely approach is usless in Peru. It's a real challenge to use it in Asia.

So I can't be of much help!

But maybe you can recommend schools in Iquitos. See the thread I am about to post in the job discussion forum (Latin America).

Good luck!