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.
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.
Switching to the online and making it your place could be, in my case, described as flying colours or one step forward two steps back, on different days. Nothing wrong with that, a new reality, transitioning is a part of the game.
But, surprise surprise, I love teaching literacy online! 1. It is easier to get the kids focused.
2. It is easier to keep the whole group on the task.
3. Adapting activities to the requirements of the online classroom is not that difficult.
4. I have been forced to get interested in many apps, online games and programmes that I have, stubbornly, avoided so far.
5. We are improving and are better at reading.
The wonders of the Miro board, any level of literacy skills.
My Big (online) Book of Words: first letter level
It has been our tradition with all the pre-primary groups to start our class Big Book of Words where we collect all the words we know, gluing new cards (word+image) at the end of the unit and choosing a letter to read in every lesson as a part of our class routine. Since we’ve moved online, this little tradition had to be updated, too, but it was quite easy because on the miro board you can pick any image and quickly, too. Whatever word your students bring up, you’ve got it!
Noughts and crosses online: the first letter/sound level
It is one of my favourite games and so no wonder that there must have been a way to adapt it to the needs of early literacy and, then, to the needs of early literacy online.
The advantages are obvious: the older kids are familiar with the game and its rules and it tasks only a moment to prepare, online or off and you can easily focus on the chosen letters or phonics. With the older students in groups we play in teams, the kids choose the box and give a word that starts with that sound/letter. Some of them still struggle, that’s why each box contains not only a letter but also a number. This is what we use to choose.
With the younger kids, we keep the competitive element out, we use a bigger grid and we simply colour it in.
Phonics stories: sentence level
Before the kids get to read for real, they need to practice on simple phonics stories. They are inlcuded in every coursebook, some of them are more interesting, some are less but there is always a way of getting a little bit more of them. After a few rounds of listening and reading the story from the coursebook (‘Mum jumps in the mud with the ducks’) and then words in different order, the teacher does a sort of a ‘substitution drill’, revealing more and more sentences with one different word to really encourage them to read. The key words can be underlined, too.
This activity can be followed up by the students creating their own similar sentences and the teacher typing them up on the whiteboard.
Quizlet quiz: sentence level
Instead of putting single words and images or single words and translations, we use definitions. Students read them together and try to guess what it is. Then we check! To make it more challenging and to turn it into a real quiz, you can ask the kids to write the words and check at the very end, award points.Or not.
True or false: sentence level
It only takes an illustration, one of the pictures in the coursebooks or in the Cambrige YLE Wordlist Picturebook or anything else available online and a set of sentences that the teacher prepares beforehand.
They can be written on post-it notes or have them covered by shapes to be removed, one by one and ask the kids to react to the text. If the sentence is true – they clap their hands, if the sentences is false – they raise a hand.
The activity can be extended into a writing a activity, too. If nothing else, they can type them up into the chat box for the rest of the group to read and react.
Shared reading: text level
Shared reading was one of our favourite activities this year, until we had to move online. Doing it online is a bit challenging since not many storybooks are available online.
Online phonics stories like those from the youtube channel English Singsing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C1qj06xduo&t=104s might be a solution but I have also started to use Barefoot Books, also on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrd0TiER_J0. We use them with the sound switched off and at the lower speed. This and the bouncing ball really helps the kids to focus and to follow the text with ease.
