What important ways of teaching English do you know?

Vocabulary
Vocabulary is what makes the language interesting and helps your child develop creative compositions. As part of the English curriculum, your child will be guided to develop a greater range of vocabulary as well as skills for deducing the meaning of unknown words. Your child will also be expected to apply the words and phrases they have learnt to support their development of reading, writing, listening and speaking. 
What do you know about materials for primary English language education?
A few weeks ago, I was honoured to teach a group of Chinese primary learners (aged between 4 and 8 years of age) for the first time in a long time. The last time that I had taught primary-aged English language learners was in my initial few years of teaching in South Korea. However, it was a rewarding and highly motivating group of learners to teach. Fortunately, I had a chance to reflect much of my knowledge and awareness of primary learners from a Young Learner Extension Certificate which I undertook a number of years ago. With much reflection and consideration, I have now thought of my top ten tips for teaching primary learners.

1. Enjoy Teaching Primary Learners

It seems like common sense, but something which is often overlooked by many teachers. To be successful, you need to enjoy teaching primary-aged language learners. You need to be aware at this age that primary young learners are still learning how to hold a pencil, how to use a pair of scissors or even still learning their first language. It can be incredibly rewarding to see the immediate progress from this age range of young learners but you need to be very very patient. So my first tip would be that you need to enjoy teaching primary learners. If you have very limited experience or just feel uncomfortable, then it is likely that you will not enjoy the classroom.

2. Lesson Topics

Initially, I taught my primary-aged learners (back in South Korea) a mismatch of lessons: a bit of drawing, some vocabulary and some games. There was no consistency or topic to the lessons. I soon discovered that the best approach to deal with primary learners was to focus on themes or topics each day, with grammar and vocabulary embedded within the lesson. Something which I incorporate into all young learner and adolescent classes now.

The benefit of focusing on lesson topics would help engage learners but you need to choose topics which would interest primary-aged learners such as animals, parts of the body or food. You just need to look at the contents list of any primary-aged material and photocopiable resources to give you an idea on topics.

3. Establish a Reward System

Rewarding young learners can be a useful tool to help out with extrinsically motivating learners to complete tasks or activities. With very young learners, I would recommend all teachers to get a stock of stickers of smiley faces or the like so that you can stick them on student work to complement them. Combined with ClassDojo, this can be a very useful motivational tool. You could say, “If you get 10 points today, you can watch a cartoon!” and this aim will get the young learners keen to achieve this task. And don’t forget to manage the children positively.

You will have to consistently and constantly praise the learners but you could recommend an area for them to focus on for the future: “Good effort with completing your drawing today but you could do better with the colouring“, “Well done with your speaking today Jason. I’d like you to try harder with your writing“, etc. If you provide some positive feedback to the learners, they will work better at trying to achieve which they could do better. However, should you be too negative with very young learners, you are likely to encounter tears so get the tissues ready.

4. Classroom Routine

It is invaluable to establish routine in all lessons with primary learners as young learners. Children, especially very young learners, will function better if they are familiar with the routines and it is very important to highlight the daily routines with right with the very first class with your students. You could also add stickers at the bottom or top of the whiteboard to illustrate the daily routine and tasks involved. I usually do the following with a generic 50 minute lesson:

Greet children as they enter class

Take the register
Start the lesson
Instruct students what is expected
Get students into pairs or small groups
Hand out material to all
Monitor learners and help where necessary
Stop a task
Students glue their worksheets into their notebooks
Tidy up the classroom
Ending a lesson
It is difficult to describe the best routine but I personally had primary learners for the whole morning so I had to think about how best to schedule the whole day and the first day was more an experience for me to see what routine worked best for the primary learners. Do not worry if you find yourself amending the routine slightly. It is important to reflect and adjust areas of your lessons where required.

5. Supplement Lessons with Songs

One thing that I focus a lot with primary-aged learners now is with songs and nursery rhymes. If you have an opportunity to purchase additional material, I would highly recommend Primary Music Box by Cambridge University Press. I was introduced to this resource by the British Council Bucharest, Romania. It is a really really good book which includes a variety of traditional nursery rhymes and activities for very young learners. My favourite task in this book is getting students to match pictures associated with the song, ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ (a great song for the topic on transport).
You could also use YouTube to help you find suitable nursery rhymes to play in the background when the students are doing some activity which requires the student to focus. You just need to search using very simple terms: ‘Alphabet Song Primary‘ or ‘Farm Song Primary‘. You will come across some great songs which could be used in class.
6. Flashcards & Other Cards
The use of flashcards can really help with your lesson activities. They can be used for games to review vocabulary or introduce key words as well as drilling and pronunciation work. ELT Planning has a great blog post about using flashcards in class (read idea number 1) and a previous blog post of mine includes ten ways to use flashcards in class. It is important to spend a bit of time creating and laminating the flashcards. I would recommend any teacher to try to laminate all flashcards as it helps keep the flashcards from becoming unusable.
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