The
greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over
another.
There are a
myriad ways of making our classes efficient and motivational, yet fun. As
teaching is such a complex skill, with so many factors to consider, it’s very
difficult to narrow it down to just a few ideas.
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| Kids Stress Free at School |
1. Establish a
Routine and Rules from the First Class
With pre-school or lower-primary children, setting up a classroom routine is as
important as any other element of your class. Once routines are carefully
established, children know what we expect of them. A well-chosen routine can
save valuable class time, help with discipline, and allow you to spend more
time on meaningful instruction.
It’s
important to establish a clear routine from Day 1. Simple routines like a Hello
and a Goodbye song to mark the start and end of English time, and different
ways of controlling transitions between activities like using songs or chants
to signal a change from story time to table-time are important in pre-school
and early primary classes. Younger children love it when their lives are
predictable. The best way to capitalize on this is to build a routine into your
classes, making life easier for you too.
The reason
why children at this stage love routines is because they do not have a
developed concept of time and they measure their time in school by the
activities they do at set times in the school day.
With older
children you might have a lesson negotiating classroom rules where they
volunteer behaviors which they think will help to make the classroom a happier
place and to help them get the most out of lessons. You will often be impressed
and surprised with some of their ideas; like treating each other with respect,
always doing their best work and handing homework in on time! You can then make
a list of their rules and even get everyone, including you, to sign it. Make
photocopies of the list for everyone to stick inside their books and you can
enlarge it to display somewhere in the classroom.
2. Use Variety
Although
chocolate is delicious and many of us could happily eat it every day, we would
soon become bored with a diet of chocolate. Why? Because it would no longer be
a novelty. We would actually start to feel sick of it! The same can true of any
classroom activity. A favorite activity can be fun and educational, but if we
do it in the same way every day and only do that type of activity, it can
become boring. We know that different children learn in different ways and that
different activities cater for their needs in English. Stories provide children
with input, as do songs, rhymes and chants. Play, drama and well-chosen games
help them internalize language and use it to communicate.
However, there are
many other activities children enjoy that help them learn language and we
should exploit them to full advantage.
While
making things, children also make meaning. As they explore shapes, colors,
textures, constructions, they are extending their experience and understanding
of the world.
3. Have Fun
Creating fun
in the classroom does not mean that the children have to be on the go
constantly or that you, the teacher, have to be the all singing all dancing
entertainer. Fun can be created in many ways – singing, stories, quizzes,
chants, games, acting out… The list is endless. Believe it or not, one of the
students’ favorite games is the List Game, where they choose 6 topics, which
the teacher writes on the board and number from one to six, each number
corresponding to the sides of a dice. The children get into teams. One team
throws the dice and all the teams have 3 minutes to write a list of words from
that topic. They have as much fun with this game as with a running dictation.
4. There needs to
be Language Pay-off
While it’s
important to make learning fun for young learners, in the limited amount of
time we have for English, we need to make sure that there is what is called as
language pay-off in every activity. When preparing a game or any other
activity, it is important to be clear about the language and learning
objectives. We can sometimes get carried away when we see our students having
fun, however we must be sure that there is enough language learning going on to
justify the activity.
Monitoring
is most important during communicative group activities. Children find an award
very motivational, e.g. a gold star for the table using the most English, or
you could give the table not using enough English an Untrophy.
5. Music and Movement
The
dictionary defines music as an “art of sound in time that expresses ideas and
emotions through elements of rhythm, melody, harmony and color.
Music has
unique qualities and a well-chosen song or piece of music can provide language
learning benefits from Pre-Primary all the way up to the end of Primary,
providing the children with useful language input that can be fun at the same
time. If the children leave your classroom singing an English song in their
head they will carry it with them all day and at home too, something Tim Murphy
referred to as S-S-I-T-H-P – Song Stuck in the Head Phenomenon.
As
teachers, we can also rest assured that by using music, song, movement, and all
the other activities involved in the musical process, we are addressing most (if
not all) the Basic Skills and Key competences.
Remember that, of the many factors that
influence learning, few are as far-reaching – or little understood – as sound
and music.
6. Surprise Them
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to
understand.
One thing
the children really like is when you sometimes let them choose the order of
your class. I tell them what we are going to do but ask them what they would
like to come first, second, etc. I don’t do this too often or it is no longer a
surprise!
Turn song time into a karaoke competition.
Bring props
for your story and hide them in a bag, inviting different children to feel and
guess what’s inside and then using them to act out the story.
Present a
song as a letter to the children. Let them read and work on the letter, asking
who they think sent it, whether they are happy, sad, etc. Then surprise them by
playing the song at the end. Try the Beatles ‘Love me do’ as a Valentine’s
letter or Louis Armstrong’s ‘Wonderful world’ for Peace Day – but remember you
can only do this once or twice in a year or it will no longer be a surprise!
Try doing
even the most familiar things in a different way. Instead of making a list of
words, let them create a mind map.
When the
children write sentences encourage them to do color parsing, for example using
the colors of traffic lights, writing the pronoun in red, the verb in yellow
and the noun in green. This will make the sentence more memorable and can help
with corrections. Instead of referring to nouns, verbs, etc, you could say for
example; “The red words are he/she and it. Have a look at your yellow words.
What’s missing? Good, the ‘s’.”
Don’t
always ask the children to write on a blank page but instead investigate the
use of graphic organizers.
Let them
present their writing in the form of a shaped book, for example, or write their
food poem on a paper plate.
7. Praise
We all like
positive feedback and respond well to recognition of a job well done. Most
small children want to please their teachers and love any positive attention
you show them. Try to praise the children for any effort on their part, whether
it is using English or being the first to follow one of your instructions.
Praise good behavior and you will find many of the children trying to copy.
Know that people
will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will
never forget how you made them feel.
8. Evaluate
Fairly
Teachers often
feel that they are at times obsessed by testing children. Try to view tests as
just part of the teaching and learning process, as you need to be regularly,
but not constantly, assessing the children’s progress in order to make sure you
are catering to their educational needs. However, a quick rule of thumb over
testing is that a test needs to be valid. This means that we should test what
the children have learnt. We also need to take care over how they have learnt
it. You may think this is obvious but we should not use a new activity type in
a test. I saw a teacher give the children a dictation in a test when they had
never done one in class!
9. Try to be
Enthusiastic, Even if you Sometimes Don’t Feel like it
It can be
difficult to remain enthusiastic all the time but when a teacher enters the
class smiling and seems enthusiastic about an activity they are presenting,
they will find it much easier to captivate their class. Hiding your flashcards
in a bag, peeping inside and asking the children to guess what is inside will
get their attention a lot quicker than putting up the flashcards and getting
them to repeat the words. That element of surprise adds to their enthusiasm.
10. Stay motivated you
Update your
skills: from time to time sign up for some training. It’s always good to feel
what it’s like to be a student again.
You can learn so many new things in one day and maybe a speaker will
remind you of an activity you already knew but haven’t used in a while. You
can even try to use sessions you don’t particularly like as a learning
experience to realize what some students in your class may be feeling if you haven’t made
your class fun, relevant or interesting
to them.
Remember
also to make sure that you have some YOU time outside school. As the old saying
goes “a little bit of what you fancy does you good”. Whether it’s taking your own children to the park
and having fun, going swimming, texting a friend or skiing down a mountain, you
need to have a rest for your own sanity.
