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I chose the topic of ‘teaching vocabulary’ because of my current teaching experience and the age group I am teaching, more specifically-young learners. I teach children between the ages of 4 and 6. Teaching children of that age means that my lessons do not contain grammar points, we spend most of the time learning new words through playing games, singing songs, watching videos, and listening to songs . The vocabulary topics I am covering for this age group include, but are not limited to numbers (1-10), basic action verbs (sit down, get up, run, walk, swim, jump, clap, colors (red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, white), animals, family members (mother, father, sister, brother), simple shapes, as well as basic phrases such as introductions and greetings. I teach a few new words each lesson, we also always review the old vocabulary at the beginning of each lesson. I prompt students to draw pictures of the new vocabulary, we do arts and crafts activities targeting new words, we do a lot of choral repetition, as well as matching and sorting activities. The videos I use are 2-3 minutes in length and are found mostly on you tube- there are simple videos for colors, greetings, family members, etc. I have found the use of videos to be extremely helpful as children not only visualize the words , but they also hear them repeatedly throughout the songs. I set up hide-and-seek activities for children to find pictures throughout the room, after they discover the pictures they say the words out loud and bring the pictures to me. This type of activity helps not only with vocabulary, but it also helps the children to release some energy, as at that age they get easily distracted and bored, they fidget a lot, they also try to lay down on the ground and constantly invade each other’s spaces. It has been interesting to see how the same lessons ‘produce’ different results for different children. For example, some children are able to remember/ memorize new vocabulary right away and they are able to recall words without much prompting the following lessons. However, there are also students who require more drilling and repetitions and given the fact that I teach mostly groups, the repetitions are used for everyone. At this age I find it difficult to provide individualized attention to students as they are all active and if I shift my attention to one specific student, the class becomes too chaotic. I have also discovered that both, boys and girls, enjoy completing coloring activities targeting new vocabulary. The use of such activity is not only beneficial for the actual vocabulary, but it also helps to calm down the young learners, which is much needed when you work with children between the ages of 4 and 6. I frequently browse the internet for new ways to help introduce vocabulary in my classroom and I have found various websites to be very helpful. Watching videos on youtube about teaching young students have also been very beneficial.
