#10 Original ideas for teaching English to young learners

A couple of days ago I found this video on the net and I found it absolutely cute. I think it is a great and original idea to make videos like this with Preschool children for the following reasons: 

- It's an engaging way to practice talking in English. Each child learns a part of the text and its correct pronunciation and intonation. 

- It's a cooperative task and all the class is involved, everyone has a role and is important for the final result.

- It's an extremly atractive project for children. There are a lot of different thing to do (write the story, elaborate the dresses and the scenery, record the voice, act...)

- Children will be proud of the result, they will be incredibly happy to see or to hear themselves in the video and they will show it to their friends and parents too. 

- It's an interesting way of using new technologies in the classroom.

So, as a future teacher, I would like to do a project like this with my students. I'm sure they would enjoy it  a lot and learn English at the same time!

#9 Using CLIL Units in Preschool

It's demonstrated that very young children have an enormous capacity to learn new languages. The earlier you start teaching them, the more they will dominate the foraign language. These language learning skills disappear over the years and that's the reason why it's our commitment, as teachers, to take profit of them. CLIL is the perfect tool for doing it. As Do Coyle says in his article "Developing CLIL: Towards a theory of practice", this system has the capacity to integrate varied, dynamic and innovative learning environments, so important nowadays. 

CLIL promotes language as a medium for learning any subject (mathematics, art, history,...), so its purpose is that kids learn the foreign language but also learn new content. Both are equally important. Moreover, and as the article's writer affirms, CLIL also has the following benefits for children: 

-Raise learner linguistic competence and confidence

-Raise teacher and learner expectations

-Increasing vocabulary learning skills and grammatical awareness

-Motivate and encourage student independence

-Encourage linguistic spontaneity if students are enabled to learn through the language rather than in the language

-Develop study skills, concentration, learning how to learn

-Generate positive attitudes 

For all of this, I personally think that CLIL is a great and helpful tool to be used in Preschool, when children are really susceptible to learn. Learning content through a foreign language will give them strong skills to be used during the Primary Education years.

#8 Engaging children in a Preschool classroom

Engaging little learners can be a really difficult task, and even more with the young ones. It is known that children have short attention spans, so here are some tricks that can help us, as teachers, to get their attention:

- Go to class with the lesson properly prepared: if not, it's possible that you make pauses and that is the moment when children disconnect and start playing around. Don't give them the opportunity to do it when it's not the time. Keep them occupied.

- Create routines to catch their attention: in the English class it can be a song, a rhyme, a jazz chant... just a clue to make them react and listen to us. It has to be done everyday, kids love repetition and it's perfect as warm up.

- Involve students in the action: the more they do the more they'll learn. So, never sit down and read the lesson, because that will bore them a lot. To engage them make them act, think, speak (in the foreign language class even more! make them repeat to memorize new words and give them opportunities to use the language in class). If they experiment with their own bodies they will be motivated and they will learn for sure!

- Keep it short and use variety: Just remember that less is more in Preschool Education, so, activities don't need to last more than 15-20 minutes each. Activities done in the same lesson have to develop different learning areas and some of them have to allow children to move.

- Teach with enthusiasm: kids notice if the teacher is enjoying what he/she does or not, even the young ones. So, use all of your energy in your explanations and demonstrations; they need to feel that what they are doing is really important and useful, and the teacher has to believe it too.

#7 Rethinking classroom management

Every classroom needs to have an elaborated management to assure children’s learning and improvement. As N. Maldonado says in her article “Rethinking classroom management”, there are 3 different but interrelated areas in which teachers have to focus to succeed teaching.

First of all the organizational issues, that refer, a part of the activities design, to the rights and duties that kids need to elaborate, negotiate with the teacher and keep in mind in order to achieve the class’s desired way of behaving. The point is to make students feel like a group, in which everyone has different and significant roles, but in which all cooperate with the same goals. That’s called collective action and in my opinion is one of the most useful ways to promote empathy and solidarity among students, two values that seem to be disappearing with the years.

Second, she talks about the curriculum issues, which teachers can never forget. In this case, the writer remarks the importance of engaging students with the correct planning and choice of the activities. It is known that to get children’s attention the teacher has to present content related to their real lives and personal interests, and at the same time find strategies to keep them motivated during long periods of time (and this is even more difficult with Preschool kids, that’s why I have decided to write the next blog entry reflecting on this topic). Giving children equal opportunities and designing tasks that require participation can help us achieve our purpose.  

And finally, as the writer says, we can’t forget about the social issues when thinking about classroom management. Creating a good climate in the classroom, full of trust and respect it’s vital to obtain satisfactory results. We have to remember also to appreciate always students work, because that’s the way we help them to get security and self-esteem, so important in the early years when they create their self-image.  

#6 The home-school connection

It is research based that having a constant connection between school and home improves children's results. It helps teachers to get information about their students backgrounds and acting consequently, adapting their daily work to them. The situation at home is going to affect kids perfoming in class in a certain way, so i think that it is crucial to be informed about it for the child's benefit.

Working together (family and school) will create a synergy in the students learning that will increase their possibilities of acquiring knowledge. Linking the 2 most important worlds of kids will surely motivate them and make them feel secure and protected. Additionally, showing what they do in the English class (or in the others) will help them to absorb and memorize the content, besides of making them feel proud of their own work and evolution. If children explain at home their class experiencies, parents can give their oppinions of our work as teachers and children can send them to us. It is also an invitation to parents to participate in their son's learning, seeing them as partners in this exiting work that is teaching. 

In conclusion, what children learn in school (including English) hasn't have to end in the classroom. The more we promote the putting into practice of the acquired knowledge the more we will be fostering children's personal enrichement and learning. 

#5 Meeting individual needs

After reading the article written by Peter Westwood and Wendy Arnold, I would like to remark the following ideas concearning the diferentiated instruction: 

As is known, each student has a different background (social, emocional and cognitive) that surely influences on his/her behaviour in school and even more his/her learning process.

It is totally necessary to look at the students as individualls, trying to addapt our teacher tasks to their personal strengths and possibilities, to ensure that everybody in the class learns and evolves at it's own pace.

There is no master handbook on how to do it, it depends on the teacher and his/her ways to approach each learning situation, but there are several studies on this topic, that can be helpful and give us some ideas on how to manage the class and attend everyone's needs. 

As it's said in the text, there are some issues that have to be considered to assure the responsability with all kid's learnig processes, these are: the materials used in class, that have to be chosen consciously and with care; the grouping of students, that should promote the participation of everyone; the projects, that have to respond to student's motivations and the interactions between teacher and students, that have to be constant and significant. 

#4 My first job as an English teacher

Today I'm really happy to say that I'm going to work as an English teacher from January on! 

I was in an interview yesterday, recommended by my cousin, who has a friend that is opening an English School in Gràcia, (Barcelona) and it went absolutely perfect! I was a little bit nervous because I could only speak in English during the interview and I wasn't sure if I could have so much fluency as talking in Spanish or Catalan. 

I had to present myself and my experience with kids, taking to account that in the new job I will be responsible of a group of ten 1 and 2 year-old kids. After exposing my ideas on early years education I was asked about the kind of activities that I thought I could do with little children. I answered that in my opinion the most important thing is not to prepare activities but to prepare the space thoroughly. It has to be a safe room with a lot of different materials (to touch, smell, look, hear and even taste) that allow children explore and interact with them and with each other. So my idea is that kids play freely, chosing in each moment in which corner they want to be and during how long they want to stay in the same one. My job will consist in creating these learning oportunities and also guiding kids in their personal learning processes. 

Although most of the time the group will be moving and playing in a free way, I think that it's also necessary to start introducing some routines in the schedule (such as eating breakfast, washing their hands, going to the wc, listening to tales, singing a song...) and this is the moment where English language gets high relevance, the moment where the teacher, in this case me, using different technics to get children's attention, introduces new words and expressions, remarking them so many times as possible, to make kids memorize them. With 1 and 2 year old children one can start teaching the colors, the numbers, the animals, the parts of the body...Althought they will not start speaking English fluently (they won't speak Catalan neither anyway and everyday will be hearing their mother language at home), this knowledge will remain in their minds and will help them during the coming years to recognize and learn new vocabulary/expressions and to feel more comfortable talking in this foreign language. 

My interviewers where really convinced by my ideas and happy to see my enthusiasm with the project so, after almost one hour of conversation, they told me that the job was mine. I can't wait to start planning, designing the room and choosing the materials (furniture, toys, books, sensorial games,...) in it. I will work 3 and a half hours everyday day, speaking only in English and as the only adult reference for those 10 kids. It's a big challenge for me and I'm really excited about it!

#3 Being an English Teacher in the 21st Century

Times have changed and that's evident. So have children and so must we, teachers, adapting ourselves and our practice to the new reality. Just as an example, let me show you this video of a 20 months old girl in her first contact with her father’s IPad. 

Awesome, isn’t it?

As a future Pre-School teacher, I know that in one or two years I will be facing 25 digital natives in one class and that’s not easy at all. I will have to attend not only to their individual skills, needs and interests, but also to the influence of new technologies on them. Society changes constantly: its references, values and habits. Nowadays our society is submerged in the digital culture, characterized by the appearance of new ways of communication and fast evolution of everything that surrounds us and our students. Consequently we have to learn about the digital resources that we can use in class, be habitually recycling our methodology, adapting it to the new era and to children’s motivations, that surely will go hand in hand with technology. 

I think that the incorporation of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and multimedia resources in the School curriculum it's absolutely necessary, not only seen as an isolated subjects, but as a set of skills that lead children to participate effectively in their social and cultural context.

Focusing in Pre-School, I consider that ICT have many applications and possibilities for students of this stage and of course should be incorporated into all curricular areas in order to improve the overall development of children. They are a profitablel resource for both, teacher and learner, because it allows to introduce contents in a more attractive way, but above all, because it brings reality into the classroom.

#2 Benefits of blogging for student-teachers

These days, in class, we are talking about the importance of being connected, as student-teachers, to other education professionals and our university or work colleagues, using different applications and communities. I'm discovering that there are a lot of web 2.0 applications and websites to share knowledge and experiences, to find resources and to be constantly recycling myself as a future Pre-School teacher. 

Blogs give us the opportunity to express ourselves, to post our thoughts, ideas and reflections about education and our daily practice, and, at the same time, what we write can be useful for other people. I personally find remarkable this idea of sharing everything, of making all public, democratic and not only for a few. 

Moreover, blogging can helps us store a huge number of files, such as documents and media without occupying unnecessary space. It is easy and practical and I'm happy to have started using it.  If we follow other blogs we will always be informed of the latest practices or tendencies in education, and at the same time we will be able to compare our daily practice with the one from other teachers, getting different points of view and a more critical vision of this complex and every day changing universe that is teaching and learning.

#1 Introduction

Hello everybody and welcome to my blog! 

My name is Helena and I'm from Barcelona, a beautiful city in Catalonia. I'm 28 years old and i'm studying to be a Pre-School teacher.

I love children and I am lucky to work in a school in Gracia, one of the loveliest neighborhoods in my city. I help 3 year old kids to eat and to sleep before their teacher comes back in the afternoon. I have been working in the same school for 5 years and I enjoy it every single day. Kids are amazing and I know I have so much to give to them.

Apart from kids, I also love  cinema and music. I go to the cinema and to concerts and festivals any time I can. I've chosen this song to break the ice with my followers in blogger. I hope you like it as much as I do!

One of my other passions is to travell. This summer I was in Thailand for 3 and a half weeks with 6 friends. What an awsome country! It is so different from Spain...its people, culture, food, landscapes...we had such a great time there! I hope to go back sometime, maybe to visit my uncle, who lives there.

Well, now you know a little bit of me. I think that's enough for today! =)