Review- Potato pals

Potato pals review
Alex Case

Recently I have more or less given up hope that a textbook can match the needs and attention spans of my under 6 year old students but have found myself struggling to come up with a syllabus and structure to the games, songs, stories etc. I have found that ‘work’. This course from OUP seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. Instead of a course with stories added in, it puts the storybooks right at the middle of the course- which seems natural thinking about what parents do to educate their pre-school children at home. The flashcards, games, songs, worksheets and workbooks are then fitted in around this structure.

The core, then, of Potato Pals 1 is a pack of storybooks based around the comings and goings of six cute potato-shaped kids, all with body parts and various haircuts, shoes and socks. The six books take them from ‘I wake up’ in Book A ‘In The Morning’ to ‘I go to sleep’ in ‘In The Evening’, via combing one hair, throwing dice (Book B- At School), climbing on a jungle gym while a beetle climbs a tree, jumping rope with a grasshopper (C- At the Park), trying to make the bed while the cat playfully pulls at the sheet, frightening the cat while vacuuming (D- At Home), lending an umbrella (E- Good Friends), doing homework while the dog waits sadly for a walk, and watching a film of a huge scary cat chasing a tiny dog. Apart from how cute some of the pictures are, what the description above should have shown is how much of the language in the book consists of actions. This means that it is very easy to make story time an active experience- simply ask the children to mime along with the story. The little pictures on each page representing the actions on the previous pages also help with this, meaning that the children can mime the actions over and over in a ‘chain’ until they can remember and produce the language.

What was maybe not so obvious in the descriptions of the pictures in the books above is that each book has two other ‘hidden’ vocab areas which you can explore with the kids- Topic Words like the feelings of the dog and Focus Words like the insects etc. in the park. The other Topics are colours, shapes, numbers, prepositions and the weather. I didn’t spot any of these until I read the teachers’ book, but the kids were much more observant and the language usually came naturally into the lessons as the kids noticed interesting details in the pictures. The single User’s Guide (teachers’ book) for all 6 stories divides each book into 4 lessons, meaning one lesson each for the Story Sentences, Focus Words, Topic Words and Review of each story book. There is also a photocopiable worksheet and an At a Glance guide to the target language for each book, as well as lyrics of the book’s song and a list of relevant flashcards. Each Lesson includes 3 ideas for games (although some of these are repeated through the book). Most of these are fun and easy to organise (although some only worked with the older kids), and some were new to me. Along with the step by step instructions there are Quick Tips on using the materials, classroom dynamics etc. and the occasional Zen-like ‘Potato Wisdom’ tip (e.g. ‘to grow potatoes takes sunshine and time!’). The authors have obviously made an effort to make all the instructions fairly short and simply written, as the book is aimed at parents to use at home with their children as well as at classroom teachers.

In addition to short songs covering the sentences of the books, the CD provides several readings of each story. If the students buy the six stories to use at home, they will also get the CD. For additional work at home or in class, there are two practice books. The Activity Book is for non-writing beginning students, with exercises on pencil control etc, while the Workbook has much more writing practice. These are typical of most such modern home study materials, with black and white illustrations and some puzzles to make the material more accessible.

The first thing I should say about the storybooks is that I found them very useable, and that the kids learned and practiced quite a lot of language by using them. They also provided quite a change from the materials I had been using in class before, for example by the sheer amount of language that was available in each book. The teachers’ book was very helpful and I found I could more or less teach the lessons as they were described there, although I usually skipped or rearranged some of the actions to make it more memorable and fun for the kids. Partly because of this, I found the songs more or less unusable- they almost exactly repeat the language in the books. Repetition is also the reason why this does not provide the class structure and syllabus I explained that I was looking for above. As the format of every one of these books is the same (no pop ups, fantasy, surprise endings, chance for the students to predict the next page etc) it was not possible to use the storybooks every lesson, and certainly not possible to use them to revise the last book’s language and introduce the new one’s in the same lesson. In fact, the books do even less than the textbooks I have tried before to tackle the main problem I find in teaching very young children- how ever many times you do the song ‘This is the way we brush our hair’ and get the kids singing along it means nothing to them outside the context of that song until it has been approached in entirely a different way. This means, I find, that they are completely unable to use such language for classroom communication or to talk about their own experiences until they have at least used the same language in an entirely different type of song or story, especially in a classroom where translation is not used. In summary, I believe that teaching this age has to be organic more than systematic, and with great variation and flexibility within the (necessary) structure of the classes, syllabus and materials. This means that I would not recommend Potato Pals as the main basis for any kindergarten age English course. Still, the books are a great supplementary resource, as is the User’s Guide, and I would recommend them for any teacher at all of 3 to 6 year olds, especially for 4 and 5 year olds. They would also be good self-study materials for a motivated child and parent(s) at home.

Review originally published in Modern English Teacher magazine. Republished with permission.

(C) Alex Case/ Modern English Publishing