Of course! You can hear kids blabbing in the hallway. To their mums, dads, nannies, friends, school’s security guards, all these never-ending stories of kindergarten adventures, scraps with siblings, birthday parties, visits from gran, new toys, rain in the playground, teeth lost, dead grasshoppers found…
They do it in Russian, of course, but that just proves that they are capable of discourse and that we, teachers, cannot really use the excuse of their age to justify all the one- word exchanges in the classroom.
Of course, they are already fluent users of Russian so they will be able to produce lots more, naturally but this post is not about catching up with the L1 but about what is feasible for the pre-primary students, pre-A1 level with the total of 90 or 120 minutes of exposure to the English language. More than just single word utterances.
I present to you… (drum roll): A discourse clock.
The tool itself is neither very complex or especially revolutionary. It is a just a neater and a more VYL-friendly toy which was created to support the kids in producing the language.
How to?
We play a game of riddles
Teacher demonstrates: moving the hands around the clock and producing sentences about a secret animal, from 12 o’clock to 12 o’clock. Kids guess the animal.
Kids take turns to make sentences about their secret animal for the group to guess.
Why we like it?
Moving the hands around makes this taks a little bit more kinaesthetic and it helps to structure the whole discourse by sequencing it and by highlighting all the topics to mention. The clock hands never stop half-way through. They have to make a full circle and they can only make a full circle when the language is produced.
The icons offer the visual support for the students and they represent all the language that they should know. But, apart from working as ‘visual reminders’, they can also be used by kids to ask for teacher’s help, by pointing at the word they need to use, without having to resort to their L1.
It is ridiculously easy to adapt to different topics and levels of challenge. The most basic animal clock can only include ‘big/small’ and ‘colours’ and more areas can be added to it as the kids progress through the unit or the course.
It works in the classroom and online.
Eventually, the clock becomes unnecessary and the kids are ready to produce longer stretches of discourse without it.
If you are interested in the topic of language production in pre-schooler, make sure you check out the posts on pairwork in pre-school, using songs, activities based on developing cognitive skills and Colourful Semantics in EFL.
Can you imagine a VYL or YL lesson without a song? I really hope you can’t😊 I should probably make a list of all the reasons why we need songs in EFL/ESL and see how many there are. Some other time.
The most important one for me is that a song, any song, is a plethora of words and structures sprinkled with some music. When, after a while you take away the music, your students, even the little ones are left with a discourse. Almost.
So while we listen to songs for pleasure and while we include them in our lessons just because they are fun, for me, the teacher, there is the secret agenda, the master plan, what the Tiggers do best…But before all that happens, a song needs to make an appearance. Or an entrance…
There are many ways of introducing a song.
When I was a little teacher, I always went through the same routine of introducing and practicing vocabulary and structures first and only when the kids were ready, I would ‘summarise’ it all with a song.
Not anymore.
Sometimes I start with the song because it already includes absolutely everything I need for a successful language presentation – lots of repetition, colours, gestures, even the written form. A good example here is ‘Do you like broccoli ice-cream?’.
Starting with a video is another solution. When I first found ‘What do you like to do?’, I wasn’t sure how to go about it because it included all these amazing verbs but there were so many of them that I would need a separate lesson to go through all of them and to prepare the kids for singing. I opted for the lazy teacher approach and we just watched the video first to simply enjoy the story the song is telling. I introduced the main structure then and verbs, in batches, as it were. The kids joined in singing with the verbs they had already known and slowly we filled in the gaps.
It is entirely up to you. This year, when this song was introduced, my students already knew ‘I can see’ from the previous units and all the verbs because we had used them in different games. I had to focus only on the names of the animals.
They can be introduced, with (electronic) flashcards, gestures or plastic animals, if you have them and this stage can be done (or in some cases even: should be done) in a separate lesson, to give the students a chance to become familiar and comfortable with them.
Then comes the song itself. You can simply just watch the video and listen to the song but there are certain advantages of playing the video with the sound off. This way, the kids can focus on the plot and the concept and the teacher can slowly introduce the lyrics, pausing and asking the students to repeat or to reply, again, depending on the group. Don’t forget about the gestures, too.
Afterwards comes the real proper song, this time, hopefully, with more students participating via gestures, humming or maybe even singing.
A song is never just for a lesson. It is a real waste not to reuse the old hits because the more we sing them, the better we know them and the more we can just enjoy them!
But this post is about the follow-up activities
These activities will be an opportunity for further language practice contributing to the song becoming ‘ours’ but they will also build the road to the world in which these verbs, animal names and ‘Can you…’ questions are just the language that the kids use, freely and creatively…
Here are some examples of the games and activities that can help achieve that.
One: Pelmanism game
In the classroom, we use small cards, colour-coded. In the online classroom, it takes only a moment to prepare a set of cards in your powerpoint or on the miro board.
In the beginning it might be a good idea to play teacher vs kids. The teacher picks one blue card and the students, in turns, choose one of the pink cards to be uncovered. The numbers make the game a little bit less challenging and in the online classroom they help the students make decisions and say which card they want. Once both cards are uncovered, the teacher starts singing ‘Little bird, little bird, can you swim?’ and the kids reply ‘No, I can’t’
When the kids are ready, they take over and choose both cards, still singing and practicing the key structure and vocabulary.
When my students got to the point when they were completely comfortable with the structure, we used the verb cards to interview all the other animals that we know, using flashcards or toy animals.
This can be easily done in the online classroom, too, because the teacher can use the google images, the finger puppets or just any toys that the kids have in their rooms.
Two: Handouts, homework or classwork.
To reinforce the knowledge of the lyrics of the song and also to check the kids knowledge of certain animals, I prepared a set of handouts. These can be set as homework, if the parents have the way of printing them, or they can become and activity that you do on the screen with the whole class.
Handout a focuses on the animals from the song, handout b takes the song out and uses the other animals that the kids know. Handout c can be done with the kids suggesting the animals and asking and answering questions about them. All three include people, too (I can, my mum can, my teacher can).
We normally circle the things that each animal can do but the same handout can be used to make affirmative (circle) and negative (cross) sentences about each animal, too.
Three: Dice game
This is a TPR game that can be used during the movement stage of the lesson, from the very beginning. It uses the same visuals as the handouts. The teacher rolls the dice and ask the kids the question ‘Can you clap?’ Kids answer ‘Yes, we can’ and mime the activity. After the first few rounds, the students take turns to roll the dice and ask the question. If the kids know more verbs, the original seven verbs can be replaced with some other activities.
Singing it or saying it?
During one of my first classroom research projects at university, I did look at the scaffolding techniques that a teacher (myself) uses at the different stages of using a song with little kids and it was only because of that research and the fact that I had to record my lessons and analyse them in detail that I could look at that issue and to find the exact answers.
It turned out that during the first lesson, all eight children were using the structures from the song in a creative communicative game but because it was a new song, all of them resorted to singing the question and the answer. A few lessons later, when everything was familiar, only one still preferred to sing. The other seven were already comfortable enough with asking the questions and answering them without the support of the music. This might be an indication for the teacher to start with singing but slowly move towards spoken language, allowing the students to transition whenever they are ready.
P.S. There is craft, too but this is a post for a different day😊
If you are interested in the topic of language production in pre-schooler, make sure you check out the posts on pairwork in pre-school, discourse clock, activities based on developing cognitive skills and Colourful Semantics in EFL.
Where to look for inspiration for pre-primary activities? Coursebooks will be probably the first point of reference for many of us, but not the only one. There are kids and their interests, too and this is how pets, favourite toys or books make an appearance in our lessons, Frozen and Co. There is the internet and what other people have created, used and share and we are really truly blessed to be teaching in the XXI century, with Instagram, Facebook and youtube. CLIL and ‘real subjects’ are another great source of inspiration even if our students learn English as a foreign language. Sometimes it also happens that we find some randomness and we really really really want to bring it to class and we design the whole lesson around a story, a glitter gun or our new puppet.
In this post I would like to focus on activities whose beginning and the main driving force was the development of the cognitive skills or, in other words, everything contributing to the development of the thinking skills: memory, focus, logic, connections, information processing, patterns etc.
Why?
Because our students are 3 or 4 or 5 and 6 and they are developing these skills anyway. Using that and applying activities and concepts they are familiar with in their ‘L1 life’ to benefit of our English lessons is something that we do. This is how songs, chants, stories, crafts and puppets took over our classes.
Because the kids will be drawn to them and motivated by this cognitive challenge. And this is how we are going to ‘trick’ them into producing the language.
Because it would be simple be a waste not to use them.
How to do it? Keep on reading.
Categorising
This is something that can easily be done very early in the game, with the level 1 students and even with the younger pre-primary. ‘It’s big’ and ‘it’s small’ is probably one of the easiest concepts to start with. ‘You can eat it’ and ‘you can’t eat it’ is another. This is what I always start with because it is easy to demonstrate and even the youngest students giggle when you demonstrate ‘eating’ a pencil or a schoolbag.
Later on, the time comes for more complex categories, either based on personal preferences (I like it / I don’t like it) or the knowledge of the world (it’s hot / it’s cold, it can swim / it can fly / it can run or you eat it / you drink it).
Another, very simple way of applying this principle is categorizing objects by colour. These can be any objects that the students are familiar with, for example toys. The activity presented here was created for a 3-year-old student and used during the first week of the course. It went very well, the student was responding to the teacher pointing at different objects and responding to simple questions ‘Is it blue?’ with ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ but by the end of the lesson he started to produce his first chunks such as ‘a yellow car’, ‘a yellow robot’.
Odd one out
The inspiration for this and the following activity came from the Cambridge Young Learners Exams. The language level of these activities is, of course, way above the abilities of a typical year 1 or year 2 pre-primary student. However, cognitively, these are the tasks that preschoolers adore – looking for differences, similarities and connections and they will certainly be able to say ‘It’s blue, it’s blue, it’s blue. It’s red’
Most of the original exam materials can be used in class but with all the magic of the miro board preparing a task adapted to the needs and the level of the particular group will literally take two minutes.
Find the difference
Again, this is a task that children are familiar with. However, the original exams tasks as well as the tasks intended for language practice might contain the language that is above the students’ level or might be too complex visually and too detailed, hence inappropriate. However, this problem can be solved quite easily by selecting two random illustrations of the topic of the unit ie the farm, as it has been done in the presented activity used in lesson with a 5 year old year 1 student (courtesy of pintrest.com and clipartart.com) and we produced sentences such as ‘I can see an orange cat’ and ‘I can see a grey cat’
I spy with my little eye
It is a great game that does not require any preparation or special materials because that involves only looking around, listening and speaking. However, in its original form, it might be a little bit challenging for the EFL kids whose dictionary is very basic. For that reason, we play this game in a different way, based on a poster or a set of flashcards depicting only familiar vocabulary.
The most basic version ‘I spy with my little eye…something big’ can be easily extended into ‘I spy with my little eye…something big and pink’ or even ‘I spy with my little eye…something big and pink. It’s in the water. I like it’. The kids will be listening and speaking and required to process more complex information in order to complete the task.
Shapes
For some reason, shapes, for some mysterious reason, are not one of the key topics in pre-primary coursebooks, despite their importance and general appeal. Luckily, it is easy to fill that gap and supplement.
You need to start with introducing the key vocabulary, at least the four basic shapes, but after this obstacle is dealt with, they can be used and referred to frequently. Creating familiar objects from shapes, counting them, calling out the colours is a fun activity and can be included in every unit, regardless of the topic. And we can look for shapes around us, in the classroom or in any picture we are dealing with.
Sequence 1
This is a great activity that is especially useful in the first lessons with the new vocabulary as it really helps with drilling the single words or words in sentences. In the beginning the sequences can be very simple and straightforward, for example ‘robot, teddy, robot, teddy’ (or ‘It’s a robot, it’s a teddy’) but not necessarily. There are a lot of opportunities here and the students themselves can be involved in creating these.
Sequence 2
Sequencing is not about figuring out and reciting what should go next but also which elements are missing in the set. In this lesson we were revising the foot items and there were four things in the set, something we eat, something we drink, something yummy and something good. We were counting and adding the missing elements. Later on, new sets were introduced and children were asked to say what is missing (something we drink) but they could choose their favourite drink ie milk, water, juice and so on.
If you are interested in how the concepts change based on the level of cognitive skills of the human being, check out the 5 Levels series on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcUey-DVYjk)
PPS
If you are interested in the topic of language production in pre-schooler, make sure you check out the posts on pairwork in pre-school, discourse clock, using songs and Colourful Semantics in EFL.
The beginning of this particular story was at best inconspicuous. We were finishing the food unit and to celebrate that, I decided to have a little party at the end of the final lesson. The parents were asked for permission, they approved of our food and at the end of the lesson, we got up, made a train, choo-chooed to the bathroom to wash the hands and then we just had fun. As luck would have it, one of the items on our ‘menu’ were the animal biscuits. Unfortunately (or, actually, very very fortunately) some of these animal-shaped biscuits were beyond recognition and it was not long before the kids started to ask questions and discuss what these mis-shapes could be…Naturally, some of it was in L1 but, amazingly enough, a lot happened in English, too. And this was the first time when I realized that ambiguity is the mother of production. Then I just had to figure out what to do with that next. Here are a few ideas…
A splotch is …a ball!
Stencils and inkblots can be one of the ways of getting started. Stencils can be easily found on the internet (if you google for example ‘animals stencils) but they can also be drawn and cut out of cardboard. Inkblots can easily made at home or in class. The idea has been also used in some of the songs by Super Simple Songs such as Knock, knock, Who are are You? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jxcWlq3CBg) or games such as Fruit Guessing Game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVE9pYdwX-I&t=45s) so this can be the first step, too!
A splotch is…a cat!
Then, there are also jigsaw puzzles and half-pictures. Existing jigsaw puzzles depicting the key vocabulary will be the resource that first spring to mind but these might not be very easy to get and very often consist of very small pieces. English classroom jigsaw puzzles can be easily produced by photocopying the flashcards and cutting them up, into two or three pieces if the students are quite young. There will be another advantage of using the coursebook flashcards as students will be familiar with the images and that is going to make the task achievable. To make them more durable, they can be laminated before cutting. In class, the teacher can be showing only one of the pieces and encouraging the children to guess the word, before the students are asked to find the other missing pieces and putting the picture together.
One of the resources that is very useful and very easy to make and, I think, needs to have its place on a shelf in the VYL classroom is, what I call, a funky envelope. I have taken the idea from one of the older coursebooks I Spy which contained a template for a page with a keyhole that children could cut out and move against a picture and guess what they can see. I made it into an envelope made out of 2 A4 pieces cardboard stapled together, with different shapes cut out in one of them. I put inside the flashcards that we are using at the moment and then the fun begins. It is very easy to make and easy to manipulate, too.
A splotch is…a bee!
Whereas the funky envelope is usually used with the familiar images and flashcards, the post-it notes activity work better with unfamiliar pictures. A similar approach is used in the song What is it? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_sdGxUxz_4&t=114s) and some of the flashcard games on different platforms but it can be easily recreated in the classroom. Any poster, illustration in the coursebook, drawing or photograph can be used for that and the parts of these, covered by the teacher with post-it notes before the lesson can be used in a prediction game.
Equally fun will be a magic bag and some realia. Ideally, of course, they will be relevant to the topic of the unit ie plastic or real fruit, toys, plastic animals, school objects but I also like to throw in some unexpected distractor such as a plastic dinosaur among all the fruit. The teacher can either put only one of these in the bag and ask the students to guess the word, taking turns or guessing together. They can also fish out one of the objects and try to guess what it is, without taking it out of the bag.
A few tips
Make sure the kids have the language to participate in the activities ie introduce and practise the key vocabulary beforehand.
Introduce and practise the key question, too. ‘What is it?’ and ‘It’s…’ and ‘It’s not..’
Later on, consider introducing more advanced structures, too, such as ‘I think it is..’ or ‘It looks like…’ and ‘It is like…’. Providing these will be a good long-term plan and it will equip the students (and the teacher!) with the tool to clarify any confusion in the future.
Remember that saying what things are not is even more fun and important as guessing what they are. Don’t miss this chance to be creative and to produce even more language!
It does come nicely packed and organised in our coursebooks, with a set of instructions on how to assemble it to make our own city, farm, car or whatever it is that we have been dreaming of. So we show the kids how to play it (and the name, LEGO, comes from Danish phrase ‘leg godt’ or ‘play well’)
However, if you are a true Lego fan, you know that
keeping this Death Star on your shelf forever and ever is not what it is about.
The feat has been achieved, it is there but after a while it starts to collect
dust and it just get boring. It is not the end of the story; it is when the
real fun starts! You take it off, you disassemble it to the very last, minute
block and then… you start putting together your own, innovative spaceships.
With languages, the same rules apply and our students
should be taught that, even those young ones or those very young ones, too.
How? Easy. Keep on reading…
It can start with a favourite song, one that
everyone has already mastered, one that everyone knows very well and one that
is somewhere on the brink of becoming yesterday news, not yet but soon.
The only thing that you need to do is to sing it but
change a word and wait for the students to correct you. It will not only help
you check if they were really listening but it can become a great new game – ‘correct
the teacher’. It will generate the language from the students but, most
importantly, it will show them that a song or a chant are not a chain of random
sounds but a collection of bits and pieces that can be manipulated and replaced
with other bits and pieces. This is also the first step to inviting the
students to create their own versions of the song (more on that in another
post).
Another way of encouraging the students to be creative
about the language is to come up with the new, alternative names for the
familiar objects, for example colours of crayons and pencils. Of course, for
that they have to have some vocabulary in order to be able to participate but
asking for ‘apple pencil’, ‘chocolate pencil’, ‘pumpkin pencil’ instead of the
red, brown or orange one can be a fun game which will create an opportunity to
climb onto the higher level of the Bloom’s pyramid, from knowledge to
comprehension or perhaps even application as we are going to encourage the kids
to create new associations with the familiar colour. Not to mention that, as
language teachers, we are going to provide them with an opportunity to revise
the language in a fun way and make it memorable.
The same game can be played with any chunks of
language that the kids are using to create the impossible combinations i.e.
put on (put on your jacket, shoes, hat or put on your apple), verbs and body
part verbs (clap your hands or clap your…nose), classroom instructions and
nouns (open your book, bag or open your…pen).
Making purposeful mistakes is
a great incentive for the students to take over and to produce the language.
Most frequently, it will be a typical teacher support technique. When the
students cannot recall the word they need in a lesson, the teacher can ‘make a
mistake’ and point at the picture of a dragon and say ‘I can see a tiger’, in
the hope that it will help to bring back the forgotten word from one of the
students. However, it can also lead to generating more language when it is
applied to the content familiar to the student, for example, a story which is
being retold in the following lesson. Even if the students are quite young and
pre-A, they can participate by echoing after the teacher but supplying the
correct word, for example the teacher can say ‘Ben is a cat’, kids can ‘correct’
the sentence by saying ‘Ben is a boy’. If the students are very familiar with
the story (for example because it is the third or fourth lesson in which the
same story appears), they can be even encouraged to produce more complex
sentences, i.e. ‘Ben is a boy’, in an attempt to correct the teacher’s
incorrect sentence of ‘Lucy is a giraffe’ and so on.
Another way of reinforcing this idea and fostering
creative use of the language is using visual representation of the
chunks that constitute a sentence or a phrase. A good example that will help to
demonstrate the idea is the structure ‘I like’ that is depicted with the
use of hearts, for example a red heart might stand for ‘I like’ whereas
a crossed heart will mean ‘I don’t like’. When these are used with the
flashcards depicting some food items, students will be able put them together
and recreate the sentence and generate a lot of language by manipulating one of
the elements, the heart or the food flashcards, at the same time learning that
while the combination ‘I like’ + ‘pizza’ is a correct one, the
other set ‘pizza’+’I like’ will not be accepted. The same
technique can be used to create other structure and the only challenge for the
teacher here will be coming up with symbols for ‘I’ve got’, ‘I can’
or ‘I’m wearing’…
