Parts of the Body

As many of you know, “The part of the body” is one the most common topics worked in the classroom, especially for those students who has got a very basic level of English.

The activity below consists in a word search, focused in this topic. The main idea of this activity is to let the students practice about what they are learning, improve the new vocabulary and of course let them make some mistakes to correct them as many times as they need.

Most of you could think that it is a very basic one, but we have to consider that we are working with children that are not exposed to English every day, and they just start getting into the English language as foreign learners. From this point of you, the activity should work as an isolated one, because the students could not manage the proper level to elaborate grammatical tenses related with the topic we are reviewing. In this case it would depend on the teacher abilities to incorporate another “helping processes” in order to connect the topic selected with some special features of English language. For instance, I did this activity for children of 8 years old in primary education and I make them work in pairs and solve the activity sharing the knowledge that they got during the class. Once they had developed the activity I asked them for the correct pronunciation of each word that they had written; of course, I had in mind that they were just children, so I was not asking them for the academic articulation of each sound, but I was expecting that they were wide open to produce the sounds as pure as they could and for my happiness they had a very good performance, because children are always willing to learn if we know how to incorporate the abilities in function of their needs and context.

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The following video gives us an example that how teacher can use media to introduce the topic to their students in a very attractive way.

The Family

One common topic to teach, especially to little children is "The Family". Even though you can teach this topic at different levels, the difficulty will be higher. I have focused my worksheet on first year or primary school students. The worksheet to work with si the following:

The activity was carried out by asking the class who wereeach member of the Simpsons Family. For instance, I said, "Who is him", pointing Homer, andthey answer "Father". After that they traced a line matching Homer and Father to finish by coloring him.
The activity worked very well with that class because as my guide teacher said, there is no better way to teach that with familiar things to the kids. In that there were some student with attention problems that work underthe supervision of another teacher, and they seemed to like the activity and were willing to work.
To close up, I leave this video that I found in Youtube about The Family that teach kids some vocabulary:

If the video doesn't play click here.

Classroom Objects

In many schools the first content unit for teaching is the inviroment in which children are involved. It is very important for children to know how to name the things that they use every day. School objects can be taught at any level of education, also in many different ways. Here, I am going to give you an example for carrying out a class about school objects for little children.
First of all, we have to be pretty sure about which are the most important objects to teach in the class. As they are little kids, usually can not retain too much information at once. So, choose few things and get some flashcards of them. . .Then choose a useful worksheet and let's do a wonderful class.

Start the class with the flashcards. Remember that kids have better comprehension by watching colourful images. Use an oral drill for each picture and make the children repeat, until they had learnt how to produce the new vocabulary. You can also incorporate some pronunciation tips. Little kids are amazing learning pronunciation.
When you finish with this part of the lesson, you can start with the activity. A worksheet is always useful and you can either create your own or download one from the internet; the important thing is that you have to be aware of the content, its exploitability and suitability. It is good to implement longer activities rather than short ones which last 2 minutes and leave you a mess inside the classroom. Time consuming activities allow you to avoid behaviour problems by getting the students interested in your lesson.
This is an activity that I carried out in a class of second grade (7 years old). In this class not all the children know how to write very well but children were very smart; so, in this worksheet children had to write on the segmented words but with little difficulty where they had to discover the missing letter (children have a meaningful learning by discovering things on their own).
When children had finished of doing this. They followed the next step where they had to match the pictures with their corresponding name. (dots to dots)
By doing this children took longer and I did not have to prepare too many activities for them.
The last part of my class was playing a song related with the topic.

Don not forget to give feedback in order to know if your students got the point of your lesson. Feedback is an exellent tool when we want to know if children acquire the new vocabulary.

The Beginning

We have created this Weblog to present the reader with some experiences and materials which can be used inside classrooms. Our focus is working with children and the idea of it is that our own experieces and materiales we have created or that we have taken from ESL websites can be of help to other student-teachers in their work. We will also present the methodology used and the outcome of our activities.
Another feature our blog will have is sharing useful links to resourceful websites which everybody can benefit from, and also extra material such as songs or books to work at children's level. So let's keep in touch :D