The most important things I’ve learned teaching English to children? There are many things I’ve learned since I began 15 years ago now. Like many of us, I started by accident. I moved to Italy with my then boyfriend now husband and couldn’t find a job for a while. I began with the family who owned the shop under our apartment and built up a few groups from there. Then I had my own children and wanted to teach them English. This wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. When they started at nursery school, I volunteered to teach a group there. I also did some teacher training in my free time. After a move to France I found my current job working for a language school and going into primary schools.
At the beginning, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t have a clue. I was making it up as I went along using different websites and blogs to help me. I knew that the lessons had to be fun. As I knew I also wanted to use songs, I found a cd of children’s songs and used that. Gradually as I build up my confidence and did some training, I gained experience and it all got much easier. Along the way, the things I’ve learned about teaching English to children have grown and grown.
There are a lot of things that I wish I’d known when I started teaching English. There are also a lot of things that I would have done differently if I had known then what I know now. Whether you’re a teacher teaching a class or a parent teaching your own children, I hope this list of what I’ve learnt teaching English to children will help you. It should give give you some ideas to make your lessons enjoyable and effective both for you and your pupils. So, this is my list of 10 things I’ve learned teaching English to children.
It has to be fun
If children are having fun, they are learning without even realizing it. If they are bored, it’s more difficult for them to learn and more difficult for you to teach. They are easily distracted and less likely to absorb the information you are trying to give them. So make it fun for everyone, if you’re enjoying yourself, they probably are too.
Simple is best
Honestly, if an activity is too complicated to explain or do, even if it sounds really impressive, it’s probably not going to work. Keeping things simple makes activities easy to understand and more effective for learning. A game that has twenty different rules and takes half an hour to play will not work for a group of 5-year olds or even a group of 10-year olds. They will get bored and it will be miserable for everyone and a waste of time for you. It’s much better to do several short and simple activities that keep all the class interested and motivated than one long one.
Always speak in English
Even if you speak the native language of the kids you’re teaching, it’s always best to only speak in English. It gets the children used to following simple commands in English for everyday things. Even if they don’t understand much at the beginning, combine this with actions. They’ll soon understand lots of vocabulary without you really even having to teach it. If they know that you speak their native language, it is much harder to get them following instructions in English. This isn’t always easy, but it is really worth the effort.
Actions, actions, actions!
One of the most important things you can do is to accompany your words with actions so children can see as well as hear what you want them to do or say. They will understand what you mean even if they don’t know specific vocabulary. You can create a set of actions that you use for all kinds of everyday words like please, thank you or for asking for things. This means that even the smallest children can pick these up and associate words with the actions.
Use full sentences
The single vocabulary words are like blocks but you need all the other words to in order to build a wall. Get the kids used to speaking in sentences straight away and, again probably without realizing it, they are learning much more completely and you don’t need to add in all the other parts later. So don’t just teach “dog” as the answer to “what is it?”, teach “it’s a dog”.
Get the parents on side
No matter how well you teach, an hour or two of English a week isn’t going to make any child progress more than a certain amount. If you have parents who know what you’re doing in your classes, what you want to achieve and how they can help, the kids will make so much more progress and your work will be made easier too. Keep parents up to date on what you’ve done in each class, suggest materials they can use at home to back up and widen their child’s knowledge and practice. Encourage them to get involved with their child’s learning. In the long run, this will benefit everybody.
Be super organized
We all have days when things go wrong.The most important thing is that you are able to adapt your lesson to deal with these eventualities. So, if you see that the kids aren’t in the mood for a really busy lesson with lots of action, change to an alternative activity that is more suited. If your games needs ten children to play but only five turn up that day, have an alternative ready. If you can’t show videos or listen to music, be ready to act out a story with toys or sing songs with no music. Make sure you are prepared and have different materials and things to do which aren’t reliant on technology working or a specific number of children. In this way, you can always to teach a good lesson.
Use songs and music
This might sound obvious but when I first started teaching, I didn’t realize just how quickly kids pick up languages by singing. Even the smallest child will learn a song in English much faster than it would ever take to learn the equivalent amount of words speaking normally. The more often you sing a song, the more quickly it will get into their heads. Hopefully you’ll hear them singing it on their own as they leave the classroom or come back the next week.
Make sure it’s a positive experience for every child
Not every child will enjoy very active games with lots of noise or activities where they have to speak in front of the whole class. So make sure there’s a variety of activities in each lesson to try and keep everyone happy. Try not make anyone hate coming to their English lessons.
Relax and have fun!
If you are enjoying yourself, the kids in your class will likely be enjoying it too. If it’s a difficult class, try to keep calm and not show if you’re stressed. The kids will be better behaved if you’re calm and relaxed. Make sure your lesson is fun for you too, this is one of the perks of the job, you get to play and sing and dance too!
So, this is the 10 things I’ve learned teaching English to children. What about you? Any pearls of wisdom for beginners or even for teachers who’ve been teaching for many years. As always, I’d love to hear your ideas. What have you learned while teaching and what tips do you have for anyone just starting out? To stay up to date with new posts and ideas, you can follow the GoogooEnglish Facebook page. Alternatively, sign up for email updates below.