It's important to start your lessons effectively to help your students switch from their language into English, and to switch from whatever they have been focussing on to focus on the subject you are going to teach. You also might need some help in focussing on your lesson!
With young learners, I find that songs are useful. I try to find a song that the students can associate with the subject. With Very Young Learners this can be a simple song like "Head, shoulders, knees and toes" for Science, and "Wind the bobbin up" for Geography. There are lots of songs available on YouTube, which are more specific to the topic you are teaching in Upper Primary School, for example "The Invertebrates Song"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVsUkVTjZyg for Science or "Cardinal Directions Song" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2I81_BFb-s for Geography. Getting the kids to stand up and do some movements to the song gives them a "Brain Break" from their previous lessons, too.
It is also important to review previous lessons. Children learn and forget, so they need reminding of the vocabulary and concepts from the previous lessons. You can't assume that they are going to remember vocabulary that they may need in order to understand the new lesson. You need to refresh their memory. Maybe there were students absent in the previous lesson, so they need to hear and understand vocabulary that you are going to use in the new lesson.
You can review the previous lesson by:
- asking open or closed questions, e.g. "What do you remember about invertebrates?", "What season comes after Summer?"
- showing the students a picture or a flashcard - you can also vary how you do this: Ideas for using flashcards
- asking a student to tell a student who was absent what they remember in English or in L1.
- checking homework
- asking a student to present what they did in the previous lesson to the class, or mime an object from the previous lesson
- asking the class "What did you learn last lesson?"
- asking the class "What don't you know about String Instruments?" and getting the students to write a question that they would like to know the answer to.
- playing a review game like "Hot Seat", where one student sits at the front of the class with their back to the board. The teacher writes a word on the board, for example "peak", and the class has to describe the word so the student can guess it, e.g. "It's the top of a mountain".
- doing a quiz in teams
When starting a lesson you can also share the learning objectives with the students. You can write on the board what you hope they are going to learn in the lesson and use this to elicit their knowledge in L1, for example "What do plants need to live?". This is very useful for helping the students and the teacher to focus on the lesson, and it stimulates the students to want to learn it in English. It is also useful to return to the learning objective at the end of the lesson, and ask the students "What have you learned?" You can also ask upper Primary students to have an exercise book that they use as a Learning Diary. For homework they write what they did in the lesson and what they learned. They can write this in L1 or in English, and you can also ask students to read their entries at the beginning of the next lesson as a way to review the previous lesson.
I look forward to reading your comments and ideas.
