Crumbs #51 Peppa Pig in the VYL classroom

Ingredients

• A carefully chosen episode of Peppa for example George catches a cold
• A follow-up activity, for example: reordering – retelling activity or a Yes / No quiz, both on wordwall.

Procedures

• Work with the vocabulary and structures of the unit, here the weather and the clothes
• Introduce or revise all the weather accessories and all the other key words (i.e. umbrella, hat, warm milk etc)
• Watch the video, with pauses to ask short questions about the video and the story. These will depend on the level of the children and their ability to produce. In the beginning we often talk about the emotions of the characters and about everything that we can see. As soon as students can use some elements of the Present Continuous or to evaluate the behaviour and the actions of the characters, the conversation really takes off.
• We follow-up with a speaking activity. The yes / no quiz is an easy version and it is based on the students comprehension and the listening skills. They listen to the teacher and react with a simple yes or no, but, with time they will be also better able to produce simple sentences. The other activity, the reordering, was created for a more advanced pre-school student and we retold the story together, with the teacher reorganising the cards and helping the student produce the sentence. Sometimes it was a full sentence (‘It is raining”), sometimes, the teacher started a sentence and the student finished (‘Dr Brown Bear it talking…’ ‘to George’)
• The activity can be repeated in the following lesson to give the students an opportunity to participate with more confidence and, hopefully, more language produced.

Why we like it

• Kids already know and watch Peppa and it is fun to bring her into the English lessons, too.
• The episodes are relatively short (around 5 min) and it is an amount of time that will not be a challenge for the students and it can be relatively easily included in a typical lesson for pre-schoolers
• Although the language of the cartoon is not graded and it is possible to find the episodes that will be easy to understand also for the very young students who have just started to learn English as the foreign language.
• The videos can be shared with parents and watched again at home.
• In my classes, we use the videos in the final stages of the unit, as one more source of the target language and of the target langauge in context and to create some opportunities for production.
• Usually, I don’t watch the videos twice in the same lesson. It might have been beneficial for the general comprehension but I am not sure about the effectiveness of such an approach. Ten minutes is a large chunk of a lesson with pre-schoolers and I doubt the kids would be still interested and focused. I prefer to pause and to chat getting the kids ready for a more communicative video-watching. In the beginning, our conversations are quite simple, very often limited to calling out the words we can see in the video or discussing ‘Is that a good idea?’, a phrase that we frequently use in our classes anyway but it helps kids reflect on the story and perhaps predict the events to follow.
• Some other episodes that we used in class included: Peppa Pig and the Pet Day, followed-up by matching the kids and their pets, Peppa Pig Lunch followed by a Yes / No quiz, and Peppa Pig and the Fruit Day followed by an activity in which we made our own smoothies on our Miro board.

Happy teaching!