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As suggested above for different reasons, avoiding teams, points and clear winners can help you combat one
possible negative consequence of mixed levels. You should also plan to do activities where the students can respond in
several ways, e.g. by shouting out the word once they see the picture, by shouting out the word you say and/ or by
copying a mime you show them to represent the word. As many activities as possible should also be open ended, e.g.
counting activities that start at ―One‖ and can stop any time that they
have heard a new number or two, flashcard
activities that don‘t require getting through the whole set, and picture books that you can skip pages of or change the
order of. As is usually a good idea in very young learner classes anyway, dealing with mixed levels will also involve
planning to cover a little bit of many different language points (e.g. one or two new animals, fruit, actions, numbers,
colors and simple personal questions) rather than basing the whole lesson around one topic or language point.
At the beginning of the course , young teachers don`t know what they like and dislike yet.
As well as doing
lots of different language points as suggested above, your lesson plan should make it possible to abandon any activity as
soon as it is obvious it isn‘t working. This means that activities should stand alone rather than rely on the input from a
previous activity to make them possible. Very young learners anyway rarely notice or appreciate clever links between
different parts of the lesson and quick changes in activity, pace and content are likely to have more impact.
Most of the teachers are worried about problems when new activities rarely go down well the first time.
The
good news is that something not going down well in the first class doesn‘t necessarily mean that you can‘t try again in a
future lesson. However, the fact that new things rarely work well obviously makes for problems planning the first class.
As mentioned above, it is usually possible to find out what things they are already familiar with, and things that are so
simple that they hardly count as activities such as jumping around the room shouting ―Jump jump jump ‖ are almost
always fun (for both those taking part and those sitting down watching). This is also yet
another reason for having
activities that are easily abandoned and lots of options on your lesson plan.
Sometimes little children can be over-excited.
In the same class that some students are too shy to take part or
even crying in, others (or even the same children a few minutes later) may be hanging on to the teacher‘s leg, pushing
the other children out of the way to take part, shouting out every word, running around while others are slowly walking
or sitting down, and crying when the class finishes. The over-excitement could be caused by having more lively
activities than their usual classes, by the novelty of speaking English, by finding the presence of a foreigner and/ or man
hilarious, or by finding that the English they have learnt elsewhere does actually have a function. A bit of high spirits
isn‘t a problem if it doesn‘t lead to bad behaviour or stop the other students having a fair chance to take part, but there
are techniques for when it does become an issue. One is to plan cooler activities (the opposite of warmers) such as
reading a book and doing mimes that can be used at any time during the lesson. The other is to think about some mild
and easy to demonstrate punishments just in case things get out of hand.
They might not have learnt
some social skills yet
In the most extreme cases an English class is sometimes the first time that a child has mixed with lots of other
children of the same age, at least in a classroom setting. This means that they might be at least as freaked out by the
other children as they are by the teacher or being without their parents! They might also not have social skills such as
working together, taking turns, sharing and accepting an equal share – and in fact children under around four are
unlikely to have these skills fully developed however long they have been trained to do so. Training in such skills (e.g.
passing games and asking them to work in teams) can wait for future classes, so in the first class it is best not to rely on
any of those things for the activity to work .
As I mentioned above about activities that don‘t work the first time you use them, new very young learner
classes that don‘t go well can often be completely different once they have got used to you, each other, being in a
classroom and/ or the activities you ask them to do. First impressions also aren‘t as important with this age range as
they are with older students, and classes that start slowly or chaotically can often turn out to be the best ones by the end
of the term or year
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