#eflkids

DIY Rulez! Listening homework tasks.

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DIY is the answer, in most cases. Especially in the VYL world.

All those missing, lost or non-existent flashcards, magic wands, puppets, handouts, balls, hats, masks, storybooks that we just nevermind-gonna-make-my-own-then (it really should be a verb).

DIY was the answer, an obvious answer and, yet, an answer that, on this particular occasion, took quite ages to land on the table and to become obvious.

The equation? A group of very young learners, studying online, helpful parents (but no printers at home so no customized handouts), a coursebook (but with tasks that I could make work only in the classroom), no ready-made material (and two steps away from regretting the decision to use the book altogether).

The first fifteen minutes went by peacefully, filled with sighing and staring blankly at the page in the coursebook. The next fifteen minutes were similar, only the sighs became more desperate and angrier.

Not happy at all. Until…Nevermind, gonna make my own then.

This time: Listening homework tasks! It’s been only a month but I am absolutely loving it!

How to?

  • Minimal requirements, your phone recording app will do.
  • Usually two takes are enough to record (although, suspiciously enough, as soon as I start, there is always a police car or a fire engine whee-yoo-ing just outside my window)
  • After a first few exercises, I started to type up ‘the script’ and it made everything much smoother.

Why?

  • An opportunity to take English out of the classroom and a recording that the kids can listen to as many times as they want to
  • Extended exposure to English, especially in the area of the functional language that the teacher can create, shape and enlarge as the course progresses
  • A great support for the parents, to help them work at home with the child and to structure it properly
  • Any picture, any illustration or any photograph in the coursebook (or online) can be used as the basis for it.
  • Widens the range of homework activities (see the ideas below)
  • Amazingly, it is also a great tool to practise scaffolding for teachers because you have to dissect an activity and verbalize all the procedures in simple English and only then you start think of all the micro-stages and you can hear what your students might hear.

Some of the activities we have done so far

  • Identifying pictures (pre-primary): It is a simple riddles game, based on an illustration with the key vocabulary. Most coursebooks for pre-primary include a page which introduces all the new words. In the example that I am sharing with you, I also managed to incorporate a verse from song ‘Are you hungry?’ by Super Simple Songs.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onlENphATDQ

  • Dictation (pre-primary) It is better to use a black and white picture, perhaps from the workbook
  • Any illustration can be used for this kind of an activity. A chapter usually starts with an illustration of all the key woIt’s a teddy. Brown (children circle the bear brown)
  • Identifying differences (primary). Additional listening and speaking practice in the format inspired by the YLE. You can use set of pictures from Movers or Flyers, a set of illustrations for Movers or Flyers story or your own set prepared using the miro board (my example uses a picture from classroomclipart.com and the miro icons). Students listen and describe how their picture is different. The same activity can be prepared using only one picture. In that case, the students are listen to the sentences about the picture and correct the mistakes, for example: In my picture, the white cat is sitting on the chair.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTBhq4TkE_M

  • Find a mistake (primary). The audio is a follow-up to the story / text done in class, record a summary of the story with some mistakes (and with pauses between sentences). Children listen and correct the mistakes. This is also an opportunity to expose them to a lot of past tense.The following task was prepared to follow-up a cartoon lesson from Superminds 1 by Cambridge University Press. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbwiidV_i7Y

  • Ask your mum! (pre-primary) Here, the audio is only used to set up a conversation between the child and the mum. A set of pictures (for example a picture dictionary at the back of the book) can be used as the worksheet for the kids to mark the answers they get from the parents, for example: ask ‘Mummy, do you like carrot?’ (and circle / cross the fruit that mum likes and doesn’t like, these symbols have been used in class before, the kids are familiar with them). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onlENphATDQ

Happy teaching!

Pairwork for pre-schoolers: Where the angels don’t fear to tread*

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Ha! It was working!

Again, I made it happen. They were sitting in pairs, facing each other, making riddles, answering, all by themselves. I was sitting in the corner, just keeping an eye.

First reaction? To run out of the classroom, shout it from the rooftops or, since they were just in the hallway, tell me students’ parents. But then, just then, I hesitated because, in my mind’s eye, I saw their reaction. What if I really did rush out, with a victorious ‘Your kids can play in pairs!!!!’

What would they do? They’d just look at me with an eyebrow raised. They do know that their 4 and 5-year-old sons and daughters can play in pairs. They did see it, a million times, in playgroups, in the playgrounds, in kindergartens, at home…what’s the big news here?

Indeed. If you at the types of play and the age slots when kids normally are capable of engaging, then yes, for a long time, children are only taking part in unoccupied play (0 – 2), solitary play (2-3), onlooker play (2.5 – 3.5) and parallel play (2.5 – 3.5) but even the children aged about 3- 4 do engage in associative play and, a bit later, from the age of 4, in cooperative play. And that means, that for most of the EFL students (with some exceptions as there are school which admit 2 and 3-year-olds), there is nothing, from the point of view of child development, that should prevent children from interacting with each other and working together towards a common goal, without the adult, or rather, with the adult being involved only marginally.

Consequently, they should be able to take part in a pairwork activity in an English class because why not?

Naturally, some provisions related to the age of the participants will have to be made and the whole definition of what a pair-work activity is, adapted. And things such as the inability to read and write, the level of English, the duration of the activity, the ability to stay on the task…but these are the things that we work on anyway so…

Personally, I think I became obsessed with pairwork in the early years about five years ago. The group I was teaching was big, nine or even ten students at a time. They were absolutely amazing, some of them I still teach today, but there were ten of them and I felt really unhappy. They did not produce as much as they could have as we had to focus on whole class activities. Until, one day, I had enough of that, and out of this desperation, I started taking my first steps towards pairwork. From that group on, nothing was the same, pairwork was there on the table, for this and for all the other groups. There is no way back.

This year, with my new level 1 group and with the BKC Conference approaching, I decided to run an experiment, a small case study, just to put the pairwork with pre-schoolers on a timeline, out of curiosity and for the other teachers, too.

The group

There were seven kids in that group, two boys and five girls. The youngest of my students was around three, the two oldest ones – five years old.

The course

The group studied once a week, for sixty minutes. We had a pacing schedule and we did use the coursebook. In many ways, this was a typical level 1 group. We did things in the way that I normally did them with a level one group, the only real difference was that I kept my eyes open and I kept the journal of the whole experiment. Throughout the whole project, I did plan to go through it in the most organic of ways, without speeding the process, observing the kids and moving on to the next stage when they were ready.

Stage one: weeks 1 – 12: the start of the course

During these first twelve weeks of the course, we did absolutely everything that we do when we start with a new group, including:

  • The first vocabulary sets: colours, numbers, school things, toys
  • The first functional language phrases: hello, goodbye, blue, please, thank you, who’s next, are you ready, it’s big, it’s small etc.
  • Establishing and working on the routine
  • The first everything: the first lesson with the coursebook, the first story, the first craft, the first video, the first holiday
  • Developing social skills, building the class community

Stage two: a new game: week 13

Since the kids already knew the toys vocabulary and we had played some simple flashcards games, I decided to introduce a more complex game and the basis for the whole project: the guessing game ‘Is it?’

In week 13, we played the game for the first time, ever, with the kids sitting in a circle, with the teacher leading the game. I did have to play it up a little bit, in the beginning, pretending to be student A and student B but they got the idea of the game very quickly. I did accept the one-word production but some of the older children started to ask full questions from the very beginning.

Stage three: students take over: week 14 – 18

At the time I was not sure when this particular stage would happen, I wanted to wait for the kids to be ready and I was getting ready to wait. But, surprise surprise, they were ready, already in the following lesson.

I did play a few rounds, with me in the lead and then, invited a few of them to lead the game. They did need my help with holding the cards and keeping the game going but that’s really it. It was all natural and they were more taken aback by the fact that, out of all eight of them, not everyone did have a go.

Stage four: team vs team: the stage that did not happen

When I was staging the whole process, I did plan the stage in which the kids divided into teams would be playing the game, with one set of cards.

The idea was that would be slightly more independent, at the same time not being exposed and supporting each other in the game and the teacher could still supervise them effectively.

However, when we were sitting down to play the game, one of the pairs, grabbed the cards that were lying on the side, took them and, without any further ado, started to play the game, with the child sitting nearest, using full sentences.

This is when I realized that we were ready for the next stage so we proceeded.

Stage five: pairs: lesson 19 – 24 and onwards

It just happened and it was a success, despite the fact that between the whole Christmas break took place between lesson 18 and 19 and the fact that a student came back after a longer trip. As soon as the kids saw the materials, they knew what was to come (I knew because they were commentating in Russian) and to reinforce the whole idea, I prepared another set of seats, in another part of the classroom.

Stage six: the follow-up: interrupted by the pandemic

Here, again, I can only tell you about everything that I was planning to do, and everything that I could not do because we are chased out of the classroom by the coronavirus.

The first step was to be switching the vocabulary, to push the boundaries of the familiar and the unknown a bit, and play the same guessing game with school objects and colours.

The second step was to switch the game and, hopefully, swish through a few stages and use a game to play in pairs, Abracadabra, Pelmanism or One or many.

Reflection

All in all, it was very easy and pretty straightforward despite the fact that the kids were quite young and despite the fact that we only did meet once a week. I would imagine that, if we had classes more regularly, for example twice a week, even less time would have been required and we would have met our aims even faster.

If you haven’t tried pairwork with pre-primary, then use the first opportunity and go for it!

The contributing factors

  • Seating arrangements: very important, especially for the first few times with pair-work. It does make it a bit more complicated for the teacher, to put together mini-stations with two stools facing each other or, even better, two stools at a small table, in a reasonable distance from the other mini-stations but it really does contribute to the whole project. Kids can only see their partner; they have a small working space in front of them and the other pairs are automatically excluded. Out of sight, out of mind.
  • Material arrangement: very important. Colourful flashcards are great and beautiful to look at but they proved to be too big to manipulate for some of the little hands. It was too much of a challenge to shuffle them, one of twice they did spill onto the carpet and if the kids really wanted to keep them a secret, they did press them tight to their chests and the flashcards got folded and creased. This is how the black and white mini-flashcards appeared. Even if they got torn, lost, destroyed, it was super easy to replace them. To make sure that they were not see-through and they don’t fly out of the little hands, the colourful envelopes appeared. The students very quickly learnt to associate these envelopes with this particular game
  • Material coherence: This is in order to ensure that they students will be using the full structures and that they will be using the grammatically correct language. Naturally, it will depend on the activity and the vocabulary set. In our case, we started using pairwork with toys but I decided to eliminate ‘puzzles’, ‘crayons’ ‘blocks’ from this particular game. I did not want my students to overgeneralize and use ‘Is it?’ with a noun in plural and, at this point in the game, they had not learnt the plural form ‘Are they?’ and I did not want to overcomplicate things.
  • Voices to show interest: especially in the beginning, while modelling, when the teachers themselves are their own student B and student A. A little bit of theatre goes a loooong way here.
  • Decision making: or in other words, teaching kids to be independent. In a regular lesson, there are plenty of opportunities for the students to make decisions about the lesson – choosing the colour of the stool to sit on, choosing which song to sing, which game to play, the order in which they join the circle, or who is the next one to lead the game. This way, step by step, the little people learn that the teacher is always the hub and not the only hub in this little community and it all comes in handy later on, during the pairwork tasks.
  • Leading the game: as soon as the kids become familiar with the activity, they can be given the opportunity to ‘be the teacher’ and lead the game. This way they will be producing more language but, from the point of view of pair-work, they will be also better prepared to take a bit more responsibility for the game.
  • S-S interaction: as with leading the previous point, the students should be given many opportunities to interact with other students, without the teacher. Obviously, with the little ones, these exchanges will be limited to saying hello and goodbye to each other, not only to the teacher, to students asking each other ‘How are you?’, to students giving out pencils, asking for them and saying thank you etc.
  • Pairing-up aka Clever teacher: Ideally, of course, everyone should be able to work with each other and be on good terms with everyone in the group and building these relations is one of the general aims of the course. However, getting to that place is a process and work in progress and it will take time. For that reason, it might be a good idea, to consider pairing children up in a way that will be contributing to pairwork, with the hope that the benefits for the community spirit will be secondary here. There might be two factors to take into consideration, on the one hand pairing up the children that work well together, on the other pairing up the younger with the older, creating perfect conditions for this pairwork ZPD, with one student the expert, the other the novice.
  • Functional language: We started with the key language necessary for this particular game (Is it…? Yes, it is. No, it isn’t) and only later, when the time came, we added ‘I give up!’ which turned up to be necessary. When we were about to start the proper pairwork, I added chants to give it a proper framework, ‘Are you ready? 3…2…1…Let’s play!’ to start the activity and ‘Let’s finish. 10.9.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1. Well done!’

If you are interested in the topic of language production in pre-schooler, make sure you check out the posts on Colourful Semantics, discourse clock, using songs and activities based on developing cognitive skills.

References

*) This is the presentation I gave at the BKC IH Conference: Exprience, Excellence, Expertise, Moscow February 2020

How to un-sing a song.

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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😊

Happy teaching!

Links

Yes, I can. Super Simple Songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ir0Mc6Qilo

Do you like broccoli ice-cream? Super Simple Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frN3nvhIHUk

What do you like to do? Super Simple Songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nddRGDEKxA0

www.supersimple.com/song/yes-i-can Check out their websites for lots more handouts.

And here are the links to my handouts: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GywvxbJohMINsDV9jOymZwc7ZLC4WPB_

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.

Crumbs (#3): SwitchZoo Online!

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Instructions

Go to www.switchzoo.com/zoo.htm.

Demonstrate for the students how you create an animal: choose the habitat, choose the head, the body and the tail.

Divide the students into teams, let them create their own animals and then present their animals.

The kids who are listening can also be involved by asking more questions, ‘interviewing’ the creators and the animal, depending on their level of English.

Print screen and save the animals. They can be used later in a bigger project – creating a zoo, describing the animals, writing the stories about them.

Make your own using MiroBoard!

Set it as homework, ask the kids to ‘compose’ their own animals and introduce them in the following lesson.

We loved it because…

First and foremost, it is a lot of fun.

It is a great follow-up activity to any language lessons on animals, habitats, body parts of even mythical creatures.

It makes kids want to talk and write about their creations.

The website is also a great tool to learn about animals, biology and geography, climate, habitats. You can build your own biome, listen to animal sounds or feed different animals.

Happy teaching!

10 ways in which you can use gesture in your pre-primary classroom.

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The Gesture is King!

How can you tell a VYL teacher?

It could be the Mary Poppins’ bag full of markers, stickers, a storybook and random treasures that they carry. It could be because you can catch them hum ‘Baby Shark’ or ‘Broccoli Ice-Cream’ while they think no one’s listening. It could be also that it is difficult to catch them in pretty tights and dresses because many an outfit was destroyed by clumsy little hands. By accident but irreversibly, too.

Look at the hands, too, a lot more expressive than those of an average teacher, hands that constantly gesture and motion, a habit that is difficult to drop even outside the classroom.

It is true that Total Physical Response stopped being the new black a few decades ago and nowadays referring to learning styles is looked down on or even mocked. Nonetheless, the gesture is one of the vital components of the pre-primary classroom, simply because it works and it helps the teacher and the students to communicate more effectively, especially if the students are 5-year-old beginners.

One: participation

Throughout their pre-primary adventure with English, the students will always be pre-A level but as the course progresses, their vocabulary range will grow. But in the first few weeks of the course those kids really are a clean slate. Thanks to gestures, however, they can participate and be involved in class activities.

They can for example wave ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ to the teacher or other children, silently, they can participate in ‘Head, shoulders, knees and toes’, touching or pointing at the correct body parts because they will be mimicking the teacher’s gestures and not because they know exactly which part of the body is the head and which ones are toes.

That is why including gestures will be important in the beginning of year although they can be used to the same effect at the start of each unit. Students, still not familiar with the new vocabulary, will react to it by miming ‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘princess’, ‘sheriff’, ‘book’ etc. Before they are ready to produce the words orally.

Two: clarification

Little students cannot use a dictionary or translation into L1 because sometimes the teacher does not speak it. In that case, the teacher has limited resources to clarify the meaning of the new words. The visuals and the realia will help, of course, but adding gestures is definitely going to reinforce the meaning. Two hands together with palms touching and moving apart (a book), fingers of one hand scratching the air (a cat), the arm touching the nose and waving (an elephant and its trunk), a hand cupped around the nose (a clown), two hands touching above the head (a house) and so on…

Three: memorising

Almost automatically, adding these gestures will help to ensure that the kids will remember the words better. There is evidence that suggest that sign language and gestures in general active additional neurons and the information can be stored and retrieved more effectively.

Four: support for production

Once the gestures have been introduced and become a part of the classroom reality, they can be used by the teacher to support the language production by the students. While they are trying to answer a question or to make a sentence and if they experience any difficulty retrieving the word or the structure, instead of whispering the word or giving the L1 equivalent, the teacher can hint at the word by producing the familiar gesture, assisting the student but not actually saying the word.

Five: asking for clarification or support

Similarly, their use can also be extended to asking for clarification or support by the students themselves. Chances are that after the children have become familiar with the gestures used in class on daily basis, they will be using them actively, too.

This was one of the surprising discoveries I made during a classroom research for my MA degree. When a communication breakdown occurred, my five-year olds did resort to familiar gestures to ask for a word they wanted to use but forgot. They still remembered that the word ‘long’ was accompanied by two hands flying apart or that the word ‘sandwich’ was demonstrated by pressing two hands together, one on top of the other, even though the words themselves had not stuck in memory. The produced the gestures asking for my assistance and then, provided with the word, went on with the sentence.

Six: imagination, creativity and symbolic representation

The development of symbolic representation in pre-primary children is an important stage of their growth as human beings (Bruce 2004, p. 170) and introducing and using gestures is one of the ways in which a teacher of English can also contribute to it.

It is fascinating to observe how, at first, very young learners only imitate the teacher and reproduce the gestures exactly, as they are introduced and how, later, they move on to creating their own ways of representing certain words or phrases. And how the teacher can actually learn from the students here because their 5-year-old ways of miming a clock, a flower, a pumpkin or a melted ice-cream are much better and much more interesting!

Seven: instructions

This is, probably the most straightforward way, used from the very first minute of the course. The students, entering the classroom don’t know any English and can’t react to all the teacher’s instructions if they are not accompanied by some gestures: one or both hands being lowered for ‘sit down’, hands palms up being raised for ‘stand up’, waving the hand towards the chest for ‘come here’.

Eight: classroom management

Naturally, gestures can be used to praise the students or to show disapproval for any unwanted behaviour. Both thumbs up or a high five (or a double high five for really special occasions) show the teacher’s approval, both palms crossed at wrists might signal ‘stop’, the index finger put across the lips will work as ‘silence please’.

The gestures may vary, from class to class or even from culture to culture. What matters is that the teacher is consistent with the gestures they use with a specific group. Examples? For my youngest students the small waving hand (something similar to the way the Queen would wave hello) became a sign of warning, although I seriously doubt that anyone else would ever read it this way. For my group, however, it was closely related to our rewards chart, kids’ names on it and stars or smileys drawn next to them. Sometimes, during the lesson, I would indeed wave my hand slightly, to remind them that if they don’t stop misbehaving, I might erase one of their stars. And it worked, for us.

Nine: emotions

Knowing how your students are feeling is very important in general, but especially with the pre-primary children as their reactions and participation will be closely connected to whether they are happy, sad, angry or scared. The teacher should be able to read those emotions but children will also be taught to recognise and to express them, in English.

The first lessons will start from the the basic adjectives accompanied by gestures (a big smile and arms up in the air for ‘I’m happy’, a sad face and fingers drawing the tears rolling down the cheeks for ‘I’m sad’, a frown and stomping for ‘I’m angry’, eyes covered with both hands for ‘I’m scared’) but then more and more of them can be added. These emotions can help the teacher, too, for example to signal that they are happy with students’ achievements or sad when they are misbehaving…

Ten: bonding and creating a community in the classroom

Last but not least, everything that we do together in class, helps the children to bond and to create a community in the classroom, with its own rules and ‘traditions’. Not only songs or stories can be used that way but also all the miming games. They are easy, everyone can participate and they are a great stirrer, too.

After the teacher’s modelling and after everyone becomes familiar with the game, the kids, one at a time, are allowed to lead the game and to suggest what you all could mime. And this is when the real fun begins.

It doesn’t have to be very complicated, only the emotion adjectives and fruit, pets, school objects, anything you are studying at the moment. Have you ever tried to mime a cat? Probably yes. Have you ever tried to mime a happy cat, a sad cat, a sleepy cat? Yes? Then you should definitely try to mime an angry pencil then!

I wonder if I have managed to convince you, dear reader, that the gesture is the absolute king of the VYL world…

Happy teaching!

T.Bruce (2004), Using symblos,in: T. Bruce, Developing Learning in Early Childhood, London: Paul Chapman Publishing, pp 170 – 195