IV. THE YOUNG LEARNER.

Teaching to very young learners was an amazing experience that taught us how to deal with little kids. Since we we were teaching to very young learners, we faced some challenging situations that made us understand the world of kindergarten students. Those students we were teaching to were among 4 and 6 years old who are considered to be in the level one or the beginner stage. They have different attention spans because they are not the same, and as it happens with adults and children as well, we have to pay special attention to their special needs.

Let’s talk about the attention span of the children we were teaching to. As explained before, children do not learn all the same. But what does it mean? It means that every child is a complete world that need individual attention. It happened in our experience as kindergarten teachers; we observed while we were teaching and developing different activities that some children seem to learn in an easier way. Something all of us could see, for example, while teaching the colors, is that some students were very good at remembering the new words, and some other could remember but with the teacher help. Some of them used to associate the new words with things that they have seen in television, for example, when a classmate was teaching the colors, a little kid raised his hand and said “ blue teacher?.. Like in the “ Blue’s clues”.”The teacher was fascinated and said that the dog was called Blue because it was indeed blue. Children do not like to share their things, and we all could notice that, for example, when it came to a coloring activity, they used to fight for the color pencils and did not let anybody take them until the task was already finished.

Sometimes we all got frustrated because they did not pay attention to the activities we were developing to them. What we did not know until that moment is that children get bored easily if the activity is not well prepared to their level or if it seems boring to them. They have lots of energy; they like to make a lot of noise that is why some activities that make them lose their energies seemed to work better; however, in some instances, we could not manged well the whole group, for many reasons. But when it came to sing a song related to the topic, we got the attention of all the children in the classroom. It worked better than explaining them word by word in a mechanic way.

They were respectful and good listeners; every day that we arrived to the classroom all of them were expecting what the new topic was going to be about . But that energy did not last much longer if we did not use to develop an activity that could make them feel comfortable and entertained. They used to love warm up activities, that is why we learned that a very suitable warm up activity was really necessary to have their attention during the whole class.

  

The book “Teaching English to Children by Wendy A Scott and Lisbeth H Ytreberg“ categorizes very young learners into two categories: the ones in the level one or beginner stage ( five to 6 years old) and the ones in the level two ( 8 to 10). We were teaching to children in the beginner stage, so we are going to contrast the characteristics the book talks about with the ones we saw in our children:

As the book says “ they can talk about what they are doing”, we could see that; in some cases the students were taking the leader role and used to tell other classmates what the activity was about if they classmates did not understand. Also it says that they can tell you what they have done or heard; it used to happen very often, for example, when playing them a video, they were all talking and telling what they saw in that video, and if it was a fairy tell, told by the teacher, they could retail the story or give some ideas about it.

They can plan activities, argue for something and tell you why they tink what think. These points seemed not to occur in our teaching practicum, but while we were discussing about it, we noticed that it happens indeed, but it is not that much notoriously. For example, some of us faced some students that did not like to participate, and they simply answer that they did not want to do that kind of activity or that they wanted to continue playing and not just coloring pictures and repeating words.

We noticed that they use they logical reasoning. A clear example is like the one that happened to one of our classmates: He gave them some pictures about the body parts in order to color them, but the bodies did not have hands, eyes, mouth, ears and so on; the children did not think twice to draw the missing parts of the body. The teacher was going to explain them that they had to draw the missing parts, but they were almost finishing with the eyes or the mouth.