Would love to keep it going but it seems I’m am not long for this school. I think they want someone a bit more tame. This was not my vocation. Only after raising my young daughter these past years did I realize I really liked working with kids and the kids like me.
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@TT @KongTaigi @stinsonlover
I’m not a teacher, but this summer in going to be taking over a class for a friend who needs to leave for a family emergency. The learners are high level kindergarten students and I expect to be with them two to three months until she returns. Could you share more techniques like jazz chants and the rubber band method I could learn from? Even experimental stuff is welcome. I figure if I can learn 15 to 20 techniques to keep the students happy and attentive it will make the summer a lot easier on them and on me.
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I think the other two guys are correct that with kids you can make pretty much anything educational (as long as you go in with the right attitude). Generally, I like things which are social and tactile. Songs are probably good (do they know their ABCs?). I think I played duck duck goose with young learners once, changing those two words to something else that was in a book i was supposed to teach? Sorry that I dont have much experience with children, but I’m sure others here do and you can also do google searches on variations of ‘ESL games for kids’ and get lots of ideas
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They are way beyond basic ABCs. They are expected to pass near junior high level tests when they finish kindergarten. They can write paragraphs successfully, but their spelling is poor. They can speak and read pretty fluently. They have five hours of English every day.
Thanks.
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Spelling is easy to teach. Lots of blends, rhymes, beginning, middle and ending sounds, gap fill, arrange letters in correct order.
If you have just a short period with them maybe think of a play you can teach them.
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Yes, their spelling is poor. I am glad I have never been to any cram schools when I was a child. I spent my childhood travelling from one place to another. I attended many local public schools in different countries without knowing the language. I was an outsider. My parents were so busy and didn’t trust on baby-sitters. But, they bought me any books I wanted. Since I was a child, I used to go to bookstores to smell the books. hehe. I always left the bookstores with audio books, DVDs and songs for children. I got piles of crosswords, word search and trivia. I watched English jeopardy games since I was 2. But, I was always an average student at school. I tried my best to stay in top. I think I still had problems with the language acquisition. Some international schools would know how to help me. But, I only went to local public schools.
I’ll try some, thanks. She said their phonics and knowledge of blends is great, but they will make mistakes like spelling laugh as laf or game as gaim if they haven’t been exposed to the words enough.
@anon25288876 mentions crosswords. I’ve used these even with high level learners and it is well suited for spelling. There are websites that will make the puzzle for you, you just give the word list and clues
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Young learners also like find-a-words. I use them to re-enforce the letter recognition and spelling practice.
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Or hangman is another classic
Yikes. It would be considered perfectly developmentally appropriate for native English speakers to make those mistakes into second or third grade, so worrying about that as kindergarteners is terrifying to me. Children follow a natural path in writing: scribbles, then letters/symbols from the language they are surrounded by (often in mirror image form), then combinations of letters that do not form known words, then “creative spelling” (like “laf” instead of “laugh”), and eventually more accurate spelling through increasingly more exposure to the language.
If you’re working with kindergarteners that are at the creative spelling stage and capable of paragraph writing, someone would have needed to thoroughly destroy their souls to get them there. It’s genuinely not developmentally appropriate for them to be there yet.
I just subbed in the summer, but they seemed happy and well-adjusted. They could pick up new things pretty well in an hour.
That’s just so not true. It’s pretty much common place. The little kids I taught writing to enjoyed it. They couldn’t retell the story the following day, but who cares? They just made up another one. Not exactly soul crushing or hyperbolic at all.