Teach English in Anlehe Zhen - Hanzhong Shi

I believe it would be fun to teach EFL in a kindergarten classroom. The children are usually eager to learn and love school because it is new for them to go to the big school like siblings or friends. The teacher will need to build rapport to help students feel comfortable. This will assist them in learning English if they are comfortable because they will need to take risks when attempting a new language. The teacher will need to be very warm and smile often to help ease fears from these young children. Children at this age will also need lots of praise. This could also be a challenging age because the teacher will need to really develop lesson plans that interest the children. It will be helpful for the teacher to develop routines for students to assist them in be more successful. Routines help students know what is coming next which is important as these students are learning English and may be unsure about what is happening in the classroom. An example might be to have a welcome song, vocabulary word lesson, music to go along with lesson, bathroom break, play, art activity, snack, vocabulary review, outside time, etc. Routines will also assist with classroom management. The teacher will need to plan fun interactive activities for students to enjoy while learning English. The children will need hands-on type of activities to keep them engaged. This will help keep their attention as they are very young and may not have been to school before. It would probably be best to teach themes at this age to help them fully grasp language skills. Themes can be fun and expand language skills greatly. A variety of materials and activities could be used which include pictures, books, songs, games, coloring/art activities, learning programs/videos, etc. Children at this age need time to play because they learn best through play. The teacher could have learning activities available in different areas/centers of the classroom. An example could be if the theme is fish, there could be fishing with plastic fish and fishing poles or nets in the water table. There could be fish coloring sheets. These activities could expand into colors and counting activities. In addition, there could be letter activities to spell fish which would be great for helping them learn letters/sounds while learning language too. In science area there could be pictures of different types of fish labeled. Even snack time could be a language learning time. The teacher could have students identify snack foods, request snacks, discuss and model manners during snack time, and clean up language too. In addition, it would be great to partner/connect with parents to expand their child’s learning. This can be done through newsletters or email to inform parents what you are working on in class for parents to continue learning at home. It might be helpful to invite parents in to assist with activities to help them better understand how you are working on language skills. Another idea would be to possibly take a field trip to reinforce language learning. If they were learning about animals, they could take a field trip to the zoo. You might create a treasure hunt to have students find different animals. Parents could assist with the field trip so they are small groups of children. The treasure hunt activity could expand into having children say the animal, put it into a sentence, and tell what the animal eats, or other fun information. This would be motivating because it’s an authentic experience. Overall, I think it would be fun to teach EFL in kindergarten because this is a sweet age and the language would be so new to them. There are so many activities that I think they would enjoy.