How can we teach English?

Sometimes when educators think about teaching English, they consider language as one of the most important things. However, we need to be aware that there is much more behind: we have to consider the needs of children, deal with class management and contact with families. In this post, I will focus on two questions that we have been working in class: What do children need to learn? and how can they learn it?. In my opinion, these interrogations can help us a lot as teachers or future educators if we want to introduce content in a creative and dynamic way. Let’s start!

What do children need to learn?

In this cloud of words, I have wanted to write some of the ideas that, from my point of view, are important when children learn a language. I believe it is great that students follow routines and sessions are well structured because in this way children  know what they will do during the lesson and they will not be nervous. Furthermore, pupils need to learn to work in a relaxed atmosphere, being respectful and tolerant with classmates, and we, as teachers, requiere to generate this environment. For example, in the tutoring sessions we can work on emotional education and prepare a variety of games where all children can participate to ensure  relationships between them improve.

Finally, I contemplate children need to learn interesting and useful topics and at this point,  it is true that sometimes it can be difficult to achieve because teachers are forced to follow the book and the topics do not seem very interesting always. However, we need to be positive and if we use imagination, we can create dynamic activities that engage students in almost any theme because children are very curious and they want to learn, discover and have fun.

How can they learn it?

There are many possible answers to this question: through songs, stories, videos, role playing, miming, with flashcards … but the aspect we need to think about it is how we can introduce the theme? For example, if we want to explain the members of the family, we just can say: hello children! Today we are going to learn the members of the family!. Nevertheless, we can  make it more exciting bringing a box to class with objects related to the subject and asking kids some questions to guess what they will learn. We can call this resource “magic box” and it is ideal for kindergarten to Year 4. 

My teacher taught me this methodology and I have to say  it is the one I like most because I agree that children are very curious and through this way we can ensure all of them are paying attention. Moreover, as they will have to ask questions we will be encouraging our pupils to participate and stimulating their cognitive skills (prediction). For instance, they will be able to ask:  it is red?, Is there any animal?,  It is big? or Can you eat it?

Finally, I love it because with this “box” we can have the opportunity to put different resources inside such as dolls, a story book about different kinds of families, or flashcards. And, therefore, we can use them to introduce new content as relationships between family members, clothing or even comparative (grandpa is older than daddy). So we have many possibilities!!