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Teaching beginners can be very rewarding, especially when we are talking about young students who are known to make quick progress and who are usually very motivated. This specific age group can benefit from many activities and will require a lot of variation. Visual aids, such as pictures, videos, flashcard, etc. are a great way to help young learners expand their knowledge and to reduce teacher talking time. In this summative task, we will take 3 activities with flashcards under the loop. Flashcards can be an easy, low-cost solution to teaching new English vocabulary and grammar. Since we are limited in characters we will work with five different categories of flashcard activities or games: card games, circle games, and board games. Card games This is a great way to get students to converse with each other and practice their fluency in the English language. Card games work best with a smaller group or during a one-to-one lesson. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t use this method with large class groups, just pair students for the same results. One example of a fun card game is a variant of quartets. The teacher prints out pictures of the target vocabulary and the corresponding words, and creates groups of two to four students. The cards with the pictures and the words are mixed and placed in one pile in front of each group of students. Each student takes five cards and doesn’t show his or her deck to the group. Students take turns asking for their neighbor’s cards, trying to match the picture card with the corresponding vocabulary card. - “Do you have a lion?” - “No, I don’t have a lion” So the student takes a new card of the pile and loses its turn. If the answer is yes, the other students hands his or her card over to the first student who will score one point. This game is a great way to practice vocabulary, reading and forming questions and answers. Circle games Activities that can be played with a group are a very popular and fun way to learn new things. One example of a circle game is musical chairs. We put chairs in the middle of the classroom, facing outwards. Each chair has a flashcard taped to the back of the chair. Students walk around the chairs and when the music stops they try to sit down as quickly as possible and say the word that matches their flashcard. The game can be made more difficult and exciting by letting the students use other movements and actions to go around the circle of chairs: hop, tiptoe, walk backward, swim, … Board games Another way to use flashcards with young learners is for board games. This is a good way to get to whole class involved. There are also options to divide the class into two groups and let them battle against each other. One example can be hangman. Put all the flashcards into one bag and call a student to the front of the classroom. Let him or her pick out one card and write, as many lines as there are letters on the board. The others students take turns guessing the word by calling numbers of the alphabet. With every wrong letter hangman will gain limbs until he loses his head. This game can be a great way to practice writing and listening skills. While there are many other activities we can play with flashcards, these can already showcase the benefits of most. They are a great way to get students involved and engaged and are a great addition to your lesson plan. References: ITTT (2019) Unit 19 Teaching special groups
