Young Learners - making things "harder"

colours & shapes

We love teaching children at Luna, and we particularly enjoy students who come to every class with big "Can Do' attitudes, like gannets hungry to learn & use English.

You'll notice in the photos our textbooks are not front & centre; we really like to encourage our learners to become independent of the printed word (massively useful to set out structures etc, for sure, and provide direction + continuity)...but to get language properly into heads we need to use it variously, flexibly & realistically.

Problem I have as a teacher with this class is to slow down ravenous appetites for progress! Instead, add on a lot of extras & let our students really go to town with their awesome willingness to jump into challenges bravely and intelligently, teaching/helping each other and being very positive.

"Outer Space" (Learning Resources)...was on the table five seconds when these two started playing (first time!) asking each and answering questions "What is it? .. "It's a blue circle." then game play asking each other Yes/No questions. Winner irrelevant as loads of great language work, prompting/correcting each other nicely. And the teacher lost!

Everybody Up on the board

Song "It's a book, it isn't a notebook" from Everybody Up 1 (Unit 1) > listening task & digging out the flashcards to pop on the board & then point along as we listened again...'narrate' it at their own speed, then join in & switch places half way through. "Re-write" the song by choosing other vocabulary items...and then try with the reverse sides (words) only...still too easy!

Can't wait to get into our new graded readers, but somehow I doubt they'll help as sheet anchors either...full speed ahead!