How to teach a new vocabulary to children from 6 to 8 years old

Fruits are so important for our nurturing. Everyone has to eat fruits to keep fit and health as well. As a student of English as a second language, we have to know how they are called to increase our vocabulary and to raise up our possibilities to talk with native English speakers in an extreme situation just either to name them or to purchase them too. Thus we learn to cope with a real situation.

If you are an English teacher for a primary school and you need some strategies to show your students how the fruits are called, there are a lot of techniques to teach vocabulary of fruits en English such as flashcards, dominoes, crosswords and so on. We are going to explain some tips to be used before those strategies using.

1- First of all you need to know how much fruits in Spanish the kids already know.
You would have to ask what kind of fruits they have eaten so far. (For this step, the kids have to name as many fruits as possible for them)

2- Make a list of fruits on the blackboard and underline the weird ones.

3- Ask about those strange fruits characteristics. This step is aimed to know how much they are interested in those fruits and to increase their skills to express their ideas.

4- Command a home assignment. Each child has to create a poster with one of the fruit mentioned before.

5- While your students are making their home assignment, you must do a big flannelgraph and a lot of letters (the whole alphabet) made of felt or foamy. Five letters per each vowel at least and 3 letters per each consonant. If your students can’t spell very well, you can make whole words instead of letters in isolation. Use Velcro or pins to stick them each other.

6- When the children had already done their homework (the posters), split the class in groups of five people and start to play a game:

7- Take every poster and stick them one by one on the flannelgraph whereas you are asking to each group how is called each fruit in English (one fruit for group)

8- Each group has to choose one person whom will take the letters you did to stick in a correct order on the flannelgraph

9- Check every word and correct them if it is necessary. The group haven’t been wrong on any word, meaning and spelling will have 4 extra points in the following examination.

10- After the game get over, stick all posters on the classroom walls with the appropriate initial letter of the fruits stuck on them. This is to help the students to remind and associate the accurate meaning of the studied fruits until their following test.

Posted by:
Francisco Cortez
Kennya Gonzalez

How to teach English feelings and emotions vocabulary for 10-15 year old students

Emotions are part of our lives. Everytime we are feeling emotions by the environment influences or rather by our own and every feeling is shown by our facial expressions. It is really important to know how those expressions are called if we are students of English as a second language.
There are a lot of emotions that can be shown and can be recognize easily but some students can’t talk about them because they don’t know their meaning or their English name.
For those students we are going to show some strategies to follow if you are interested in teaching English.
These strategies are shown by steps below

GROUP ACTIVITIES

1) Make a list of feelings in Spanish and English on the blackboard and match them with a help of your students. Then, ask them what they think about those feelings?
Have each child to write on the blackboard and create a brainstorm. Put all the ideas on the board and tell everybody write on their noteboks the ones that work the best for them personally. As a warm up, have the group think of synonyms for each of the feelings in this list.
The purpose of this activity is to help kids understand that there are things they can do to change the way they are feeling.

2) Have the group make a list of "helpers" who are available to kids who might be afraid or worried. Ask the kids to describe instances when they've used these helpers.
3. Design a poster that illustrates the feelings and helps children to recognize them.

WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

1. Describe in as much detail as you can what it is like to cry, what it is like to laugh.
2. Command every child write a letter to an imaginary friend telling about a time they really felt good the same for a time they really felt bad about something.
If your students are teenager
3. If your students are teenagers. Set tasks to describe a time they had a hard time coping with the way they felt about something. What made it hard? What did they do about it? Is there something they could have done that would have made it easier?
4. Select one of the feelings from item #1 (or any other feeling that comes to mind), and tell them to think of an animal or a person that reminds them of that feeling. What is it about that animal that reminds them of that feeling? Then they’ll write a poem about that animal o person.
5. They will describe how a person looks and acts like when he or she is feeling:
a) proud
b) scared
c) angry
d) embarrassed
e) happy
f) sad
6. You encourage them to make a list of people they trust enough to discuss their feelings with.

HOME ASSIGNMENTS

If you are allowed or if it’s possible to you, enlist the involvement of parents, make copies of the "For Parents" block and send them home with the children. Tell the children to discuss a video with their parents, and to perform the following activities. (It is up to you or your possibilities)

1. With help from their relatives they’ll have to make a list of their "firsts," with dates (first walked, first tooth, first day/night away from home etc.) they have to ask them to describe how they felt on each of these occasions. Ask how they felt on each of these occasions. Write these feelings next to each "first" on their list.
2. Tell them to ask an adult in their families what things scare him or her. These can be added to a "Things That Scare Adults" chart in class.
3. Tell your students to ask their relatives what they do to relax when they are feeling angry. They’ll ask them what they do to help themselves when they are angry.

Perhaps they could give written or oral reports or discuss their experiences in small groups.
After you had shown your students some vocabulary about feelings and emotions, and they had brought all their assignments to the classroom, you can use many strategies to reevaluate them at all.
Some of the useful strategies to make a review before a test are some games like scramble, crossword, flashcards, word bank, wordsearch and so on...

These cards are a great way to review human emotions as well as causes. There is a lot of good vocabulary work to be contained in the cards if you want.

This game plays like the game fish, but with a catch: First they have to ask if the other student has that emotion and then they ask about the reason. They have to match both reason and emotion to get the point. When asking about emotion, they can choose from any of the possible synonym for the emotion.

Wordsearch are really useful in learning of a foreign language because they help to remind word spelling and to keep the words in mind
The object of the game is to find and mark all of the words hidden in the grid


Posted by:
Francisco Cortez
Kenya Rodriguez

How you can improve your speaking in English

Some people say that speaking is one of the most difficult skills that English learners need to have because some learners do not have enough vocabulary, they do not know about grammar structure or the pronunciation sometimes is not good. But, we know that it is a process and we should take every opportunity to speaking English, It is not important if you make mistakes.

We think that at the beginning of the learning process all students are insecure because sometimes the lack of vocabulary is common in these cases; when a person is starting to learn another language, the other important factor is the coherence and the cohesion in a discourse as people who never had practiced his/her spiking skills tend to speak very slow for this reason fluency is a very important thing. On the other hand the students always have some problems with the correct pronunciation and the intonation of the phrases too.

Now, everyone can improve their speaking, so here there are some tips to achieve it:

•Ask your teacher to correct important mistakes while you are speaking.
•Ask your teacher to note important mistakes, and correct them after you have spoken.
•Try to “think in English” as much as you can.
•Spend a few seconds thinking about how and what you want to say in English.
•Try to listen English speakers in the radio, CDs, TV and if you know one talking with he/her.
•Record you voice. Then listen and tried to identify your mistakes.
•Avoid translating words in your own language, but if it is necessary use a good dictionary or ask your teacher when you are not sure about the meaning or pronunciation of a word or phrase.

Posted by:
Lourbelys Linares
Noherist Ochoa.

Young Learners and the Phonemic Chart

Interesting, useful, easy…

The main aim of this article is for teachers to help their students become more knowledgeable and interested in learning the sounds of English and to help them see how it can facilitate autonomous learning with self-study English language learning material and dictionaries. Hopefully if we start educating learners from a young age they will be more comfortable with phonemic script and see the benefits of it when they are older and more self-aware learners.

Why to use the chart?

First of all let's take a look at why we should use the phonemic chart at all in class. We have spoken to many teachers who say they shy away from using the chart. Perhaps they are unfamiliar with the sounds and symbols, or they see it as too difficult for their students to learn. Or they might have come up against student resistance to using the symbols in class doing pronunciation work. Hopefully this article will help us to see how it can be incredibly beneficial for teachers and students to become more familiar with the sounds and give them some ideas of how they can become more confident (teachers and students) about using the phonemic chart.

Here are some of the reasons we can see for using the phonemic chart in pronunciation work:

° It provides a standard from which to teach and learn pronunciation.

° It enables the students to better use their dictionaries.

° It gives the teacher a fast and effective tool for teaching pronunciation and for correcting errors.

If, as a teacher, you feel you are still learning about pronunciation or want to learn about the phonemic chart then doing activities is one of the best ways of doing this.

Teachers can be selective about the sounds they help their learners to focus on. Learners should be made aware of the importance of pronunciation and of which sounds help them to become more comprehensible in the English speaking world.

Although the following activities are aimed mainly at young learners many would be ideal for adult groups. Adults also enjoy kinesthetic activities, and many of the ones described in this article are just that!

Let’s star to enjoy some activities below

*Make your own wall charts*

° Put the symbols you want to learn on the board and drill them.

° Then ask students to match flash cards with each symbol. For example, /i:/ can be matched with a picture of cheese.

° Then ask the children to draw the symbol and the picture on the top of a large piece of colored card. These cards are then stuck to the wall for the next class.

° In the next class, the children are put into colored teams. Each team is given ten words on cards which they have to stick to the posters. Play some fun music to do this! Give them a time limit.

Then, check how many they got correct. (Try to use words they are familiar with, or words you want to revise.) The winners are those with most correct.

Every few classes you can revise this, repeat it and add to it. So you end up with a comprehensive and colorful wall display all created by them. Much more interesting than a published phonemic chart for young learners.

*Using dictionaries*

This should be done with students who are familiar with the script and is suitable more for teenagers and adults.

° Choose five words from the dictionary and write them in phonetic script.

° Ask the students in pairs to write down what they think the word are.

° Then get the students to swap papers with a different group and ask them to look up the word to see if they were correct.

° The winners are the group with most correct.

° Then they can make a new list of five words for the other group to repeat the activity with.

° This can be combined with a revision of vocabulary from the course book they are using. The students look up words in the dictionary from the book and transcribe them for the other group to guess.

*Going shopping*

This is a communicative activity which incorporates some sounds you have been doing in class into a shopping list activity where the students have to practice dialogues buying certain items like cheese, meat, /i:/, and crisps, milk /I/.

Students can be put into two groups of shop owners and customers with a budget to make it more 'authentic'. Then they have a certain time to buy all the items they can on the list. For the shop owners, give them flash cards of food items or pieces of card with the food and prices on them. Afterwards they can decide the cheapest and most expensive shops as a class.

Posted by:

Zulving Franco

Yesenia Yovera

Gabriel Indriago

Engilsh Clubs

An interesting strategy to teach English

An English club is a very useful tool used to help teachers catching the attention of their students to improve their skills and make them more interested in learning new word, grammar and a lot of things so necessary to understand and how to use English. In these clubs the young, middle and older learners could take part, in order to raise their interests and cover the needs in learning English.

Starting an English Club is a great way to make new lasting friendships. It is important to have good ESL friends because your confidence will increase if you do. You will feel more comfortable using English around people you trust and have fun with. This strategy is really helpful in any age and what you want to do is use English clubs in class, in the first place, use it with young learners, in fact, it’s absolutely necessary for making a solid base in YL’s English skills.

English is being recognized as a world language, and many people believe that the earlier children start learning English, this means, learners will be more successful if they begin studying English at an early age. The English clubs have been designed to provide primary school age learners with a positive initial exposure to the English language before they begin formal academic study of language in middle school. “One of the real advantages to having children start learning English at an early age is that they are better equipped to develop English language pronunciation.”(Birdsong 1999).

What do you have to do for starting an English Club?

*Setting the ideal place*

The easiest place to hold an English Club is in a spare classroom in the English class. Wherever you hold your club, remember that it is a club, not a class. To change the atmosphere in a classroom you might want to open windows or have background music or candles. A pot of coffee or a bowl of popcorn can also make the meeting feel more like a club than a class. You will also have access to materials and television equipment to make more interesting this place that you have chosen.

*Making a special ritual to start it better*

Try to start each session with a ritual so that they know they have entered into the ‘English Zone’. This is especially important if you are just coming into their normal classroom and teaching where their normal teacher would be. You may choose a welcome song or create a phrase to be prepared to start talking about the topic of the day. However, it is so important to try considering the ages of your students, because the activities or song you want to use to do it, they are not the same to the youngest as the oldest student’s activities. Be careful with this.

*To teach them to work together, in any spare of the ideal place*

If possible gather everyone into a circle on the floor to get them out of their seats. This may not be feasible given the seating arrangements you have but make sure you ask about the possibility of changing the seats or even room. If you can’t change the seats themselves then get the students to sit in different places; it is another strategy used to get a work in group. Getting along with them is necessary as well as possible, so include yourself into the group as ones of them. In this way, they could respect to you better.

*Choosing interesting themes to talk about*

You can organize your club in many ways. Everyone can write down a topic that they want to debate, or you can talk about popular culture and current events. Someone can bring in a newspaper article and everyone can read it together and discuss it. Reading clubs are a type of English Club. Each person reads the same book and the club discusses aspects such as what they liked about it, who their favorite characters were, etc. by ages, you can use plenty of strategies for example , in the case of children you may use toys, pictures of houses or something like this, and say to them ‘describe your bedroom ‘ and that kind of things. Although some clubs will be full of members that only want to practice one skill, such as conversation.

A conversational club meetings are often very casual and require little planning. In regards to this, it is really important recognizing that no everyone has the same English level and it’s really necessary using time to explain to your student that there will be other students with different levels of English in the class and that you will be using partnering and grouping exercises and activities in order to meet the needs of everyone. You may find that some students feel uncomfortable acting as a peer tutor, while others feel that they are focusing too much on a skill that they will never use in the real world.

Start a new club session regularly .This will keep the club alive! Change activities/themes that didn't work the first time. Keep adding new ideas, but try to maintain a club identity.

Finally, remember…

Teaching someone else a grammar point or explaining how to use a new word is one of the best ways to review your skills. The purpose of the club is to use English in a life-like situation. Do what feels natural and comfortable.

Posted by:

Zulving Franco

Yesenia Yovera

Gabriel Indriago

Teaching English to Young Learners

Learning to teach… is easy to learn.

Teaching English to Young Learners (TEYL) has been one of the things, regarded to education that has its own field of study in plenty of countries around the world.Believing that starting the study of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) before the critical period 12 or 13 years old, will build more proficient speakers of English. However, there is no empirical evidence supporting the idea that an early star in English speakers (Nunan 1999). Levels of proficiency seem to be dependent on other factors _ type of program and curriculum, number of hours spent in English class, and techniques and activities used (Rixon 2000).

Sometimes, it can be seen in classrooms that learners tend to have short attention towards the study of foreign languages and what they like the most is the physical and the tangible. Their understanding often comes through hands and eyes and ears; the physical world is dominant at all times. One way to capture their attention and keep them engaged in learning, in this case, English language, is to supplement the activities with lots of brightly colored visuals, pictures, drawings and also songs.

Making changes in the classroom helps you to catch the attention of your students because it would become one of the best places in their daily lives where they could imagine, enjoy and learn at the same time. First of all, you have to remember that you are a leader and you must convey your pupils you have to be respected by them. So a teacher should be organized in order to do the activities and cover daily lessons to catch the attention and respect.

The order of the activities is important to have them connected to each other in order to support the language learning process. Moving from one activity to other that is related in content and language helps to recycle the language and reinforce students understanding and use of it. However, moving from activity to activity when the activities are not related to each others can make it easy to lose the focus that children have on class. In addition, if you use thematic units, which are a series of lessons resolving around the same topic or subject, can create a broader context and allow students to focus more on content communication than on language structure.

Teaching English could be better and easier using interesting activities and strategies to develop the learning processes: visual, auditive and kinestesic. Related to this way of making interesting English classes, here are some activities you could use with your students and some advice and tips that you should follow to be a great teacher. We hope you enjoy applying them.

*The game of Opposites*

Opposite Adjectives: tall-short big-small fast-slow thin-fat happy-sad cold-hot...

*_ Show flashcards illustrating opposites. Invite the class to observe the images and repeat their names with you.

*_ Challenge the children to mime the meaning of those opposites. E.g. Call out:Tall! And they will have to represent TALL.

*_ Repeat the activity using opposites. Call out, e.g.:TALL! The children will have to think of the opposite and mime SHORT.

*_Stick opposite picture cards on the floor and walls. Call out an adjective and challenge the classto run, find and touch the picture of the corresponding opposite.

*_Work with colour ribbons. Divide the class into three groups. Each group has a colour: blue, red, yellow, etc. Repeat the activity above, but this time calls a group to find an opposite and join the two words with their ribbon. E.g. Green Team, find the word BIG! Tell them to move the ribbons while looking for the opposite.

*_ Hang cards with opposite pictures from the children’s neck and at the count of three, they have to find their partners. Each pair of opposites stands at the front and waits for the rest to finish the game.

*Learning through songs*

The following is a several suggestion for ELT activities with young learners, a choosing rhyme, a singing game, a chain dialogue, and song. Let us sing the song.

*Songs

OPPOSITES

CHORUS

Op, op, opposites,

Op, op, opposites,

Op, op, opposites,

What a funny word.

VERSE 1

Teach me about this funny word,

“Opposites,” you say.

Op, op, opposites,

Tell me what are they?

SPOKEN

Big, little; up, down;

Happy, sad; full, empty;

Wet, dry; in, out.

Opposites!

REPEAT CHORUS

VERSE 2

Teach me about this funny word,

“Opposites,” you say.

Op, op, opposites,

“Tell me more,” I say.

SPOKEN

Long, short; straight, curly;

Dirty, clean; awake, asleep;

Black, white; heavy, light;

Opposites!

REPEAT CHORUS

TAG

What a funny word.

Created By the Authors Pam Beall and Susan Nipp

*Explanation of the activity*

The group of children forms a circle and the teacher begin to sing the song, and they have to follow the song and repeat it until they learn the song.

Let´s do it!

Posted by:

Zulving Franco

Yesenia Yovera

Gabriel Indriago

Activities to Teaching English Vocabulary to Younger Learners

Teaching English as a second language in our country could be difficult, because some learners are not be interested in learning another language or do not like English. But nowadays we know that English is one of the largely spoken languages in the world which is one of the reasons why learning it is really important. So, we have to find the way to demonstrate that most learners can learn English. It does not necessarily have to be difficult or boring. The secret is being creative and adapt to the necessities of students or learners.

In this issue we will suggest some activities and resources which can help you or that you can use to teaching English. These activities are mostly related to vocabulary learning, with topics such as numbers, the time, music and musical instruments, and the alphabet. In regard to vocabulary we have to take into a count, that it is the most important to start our teaching and also the most easier, because if learners know vocabulary is less difficult to them learn structures and sentences. In this case we star with the most basic vocabulary.

Topic: Music
Activity: Have students sing this song to learn some musical instruments and music related vocabulary.

We are in an Orchestra
We are in an orchestra
We love to sing and dance
And we can play
The tambourine
Tambour-tambour-tambourine, tambourine, tambourine
Tambour-tambour-tambourine, tambour-tambourine

We are in an orchestra
We love to sing and dance
And we can play
The clarinet
Clari-clari-clarinet, clarinet, clarinet
Clari-clari-clarinet, clari-clarinet
Tambour-tambour-tambourine, tambourine, tambourine
Tambour-tambour-tambourine, tambour-tambourine

We are in an orchestra
We love to sing and dance
And we can play
The piano
Pia-pia-piano, piano, piano
Pia-pia-piano, pia-piano
Clari-clari-clarinet, clarinet, clarinet
Clari-clari-clarinet, clari-clarinet
Tambour-tambour-tambourine, tambourine, tambourine
Tambour-tambour-tambourine, tambour-tambourine

We are in an orchestra
We love to sing and dance
And we can play

The violin
Vio-vio-violin, violin, violin
Vio-vio-violin, vio-violin
Pia-pia-piano, piano, piano
Pia-pia-piano, pia-piano
Clari-clari-clarinet, clarinet, clarinet
Clari-clari-clarinet, clari-clarinet
Tambour-tambour-tambourine, tambourine, tambourine
Tambour-tambour-tambourine, tambour-tambourine

Then, you can have students practice the name of the instruments and imitate the way to play them, talk about famous singer. To recycle the vocabulary learning activity, you can have students practice phrase grammatical structure such as: I can play… or I can´t play. Other resource can be obtained by making a crossword puzzle which the name of the instruments that students learned.

Topic: The time
Activity: You can make a clock with cardboard and bright colors and practice telling the time in English, play a listening game by moving the clock’s hands to the correct time. Also, play a matching game to identify the time on the clock and match it with phrases written on the black board. Another way to use the clock is to ask about daily routine; for example, what time do you have breakfast? Or what time do you go to the bed?

This way, they’ll be practicing grammar too! The learner can put the hands of the clock to correct the time and then tell you at what time they do each daily activity. Set the clock to a certain time and say in English either the correct time on the clock or a random one. The students should say whether it´s true or false.

Topic: The alphabet
Activity: Teach your students the following song to learn the alphabet.

ABCD E I´m in the jungle in a coconut tree
FGH I J Do you want to come and play?
KLM N OPQ I will bring a friend or two R S TUV A zebra and a chimpanzee WXYZ we will play until it is time for bed

Song and Lyrics by Andy Henley/Tym King; Animation by Cambridge English Online LGuardar ahoratd

Posted by:
Ochoa Noherist
LinaresLourbelys