VYL teacher

VYL speaking activities and the cognitive skills development

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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.

P.S.

The basic overview of what cognitive skills are: here https://helpfulprofessor.com/cognitive-skills/

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.

We Want More! (vol.1)

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Creative use of the language or…LEGO!

Because that’s what language is: LEGO blocks.

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’…