FUN: These students are young, new to school life, studying and foreigners. We want to start the year with non-threatening easy, fun and games, as they adapt to the lesson format. These basic games allow anyone to join in and succeed. This is especially important, as there are often many demonstration lessons happening at this time. It also means that students, who joined the class late, haven’t missed too much.
SMALL DOSES : Young students take a long time to absorb the material. They also have short attention spans. Sometimes it’s better to give them small doses of content, over a long period of time, instead of just one big dose. For example, we could spend an hour studying the PRONOUN + VERB pairs (‘I am …’, ‘He is …’, etc.) and they still won’t get it. Also, it would be a boring hour. Instead, we would study it for a bit, then fill the lesson with something else. Then do it again next week.
INCEPTION : We also don’t want to wait until November before they hear the ‘in, on, under’ song. If we sing it periodically all year, it will make the PREPOSITIONS UNIT much easier when we reach it, 7 months later.
OVERLAP: Everything is connected. There’s a lot of overlap between the UNIT material and the Word Cloud etc. Humming or singing the jingles and songs will help teach the Word Cloud, which in turn helps teach the UNIT later in the year. There are several examples of this:
PREPOSITIONS: When students struggle with the PREPOSITIONS in the Word Cloud, you can hum the chorus of the ‘In, on, under’ song to help students find the correct word.
THIS/ THAT /THESE/ THOSE: In the Orange Word Cloud there are a series of , ‘This is a mouse.’, ‘That is a frog.’ cards If we could sing the, ‘This is a fish.’ song a few times, at the start of the year, then we can use it to jog kid’s memories during Word Cloud.
FOOD: When a ‘FOOD’ card, (fruit / vegetable), appears in the Word Cloud, you can expand in it by singing, ‘Do you like .. onion ..? , which also happens to be one of the Daily Questions.
Give it a try!