What I just learnt on YouTube

A rare occurence, I know, but this kansaikidsdotcom YouTube channel (of a school called The Learning Tree which I had never heard of- thank you Google!) had lots of little teaching ideas for young and very young learners that I’d never thought of or seen:

- Get the students to whisper their answers to the teacher so that they have to come back and be checked on rather than just running around and randomly shouting. It could also help with them just copying other people’s answers, but with preschool “whispering” that won’t often be the case

- Get the person who is centre of attention, e.g. the person miming or shouting out instructions for others to do, to stand on a stool or block (health and safety permitting- Japanese parents are suprisingly tolerant of injuries in class, but others might be less so!)

- Get students doing TPR to stand in hoops between actions (plus lots of other ideas on how to use hoops and blocks)

- Put props for TPR such as toothbrushes on tables at the other end of the room so that students have to run, do the action and run back

- A barrier that students can sit behind so that they can’t see the rest of the classroom, as again preschool students “closing their eyes” is not closing eyes as we usually know it!

- When doing clothes, set up a strip of carpet or paper as a runway and have students walking first their coloured in people and then themselves down it while their clothes are described (although I’d do more to keep the others who are not on the runway involved)

- Having relevant songs on in the background when they are doing crafts, reading games etc (although this perhaps takes away from the teacher chanting or just repeating the actions that they are doing)

- When they have arranging tasks like putting days of the week in order, throw the cards into the air rather than just placing them on the table (singing a line about snowing from the classic How’s the Weather song from Let’s Go while doing it being an inspired extra touch)

- Rather than them getting their own bags, books etc, the teacher takes one at the time and the students whose things it is says “It’s mine”

- To stop them all rushing to the teacher at the same time, get them doing some kind of obstacle course on the way back, e.g. jumping in hoops or crawling through a tube

- Have the room full of stuff students can fetch when practising shapes, adjectives etc (although how they keep them from pulling that stuff off the shelves at other points of the lesson I’d love to know!)

I’ve sent them an email to ask questions like that and get more teaching ideas, so hopefully more coming soon

Tags: Youtube

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Eikaiwa, TEFL, Teaching English in Japan, Teaching young learners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.