I am currently teaching English in South Korea to elementary school children. My more advanced classes are OK; the kids are good enough in English, and there’s more than enough material to keep things interesting without my having to bend my cerebellum backwards over the desk to come up with ways to keep them occupied.
The beginner’s class, however, is a different story. The textbooks are fun, with cute cartoon animals, but there’s only so much material to cover, and so far, I find myself trying to stretch the classroom time with rote recitation and simple questions. The kids do their best, but they’re nine and ten year old kids, and those guys simply have a limit.
Does anyone with ESL or any other teaching experience have ways to keep the children occupied? Games involving the material? Other interesting activities? Ways to gauge progress? I’m not looking for anything too fancy or elaborate. The kids are OK, and a little originality would go a long way toward keeping them involved in the lesson.
Plenty of games work well as language teaching tools, like 20 Questions, Password, Charades and I Spy. These can be student vs. student, or class vs. teacher. Such games not only reinforce vocabulary, but also help teach students to circumlocute to get their point across if they don’t know or can’t remember a word (“it’s that thing that you write with - not on paper - you use all your fingers” = keyboard), which is a valuable skill in learning a language.
Other fun things:
Have a “fashion show”. Bring in a bunch of old clothing, and let the kids dress up, then take turns walking the runway and describing the outfits.
Collaborate on a story. One student writes a sentence, and the next student has to use it as the starting point for theirs: “Eun-Jee has a brother”… “He is older than her”… “He is ugly (tee-hee!)”
Use magazine pictures as prompts, and let the students write few sentences describing what is happening in the picture, or what happened before, or what will happen after.
Also, pick something the kids enjoy (soccer, video games, music, etc.), and plan some theme lessons. They’ll be more motivated to learn new words and actually try to use them if it helps them talk about something they’re interested in.
books vocabulary is very limited, work with the students to come up with more words. Say today’s theme is “the colors.” Black, white, red, yellow, blue, green. If the writer was very creative, brown. Get the students to give you more colors and teach them the English for them. It’s even more beastly with things like food and, although a beginner’s class of 9yos won’t be able to talk in English about high cuisine, they may find it interesting to hear which Korean dishes are known in America and which ones you’d never seen before moving there.
related to that, we once spent a whole class (and occasionally a few minutes) playing “related words.”
The teacher wrote “red” on the blackboard. That prompts, as related words in English, any color’s name. Also its Spanish translation: rojo. Ah, but red also happens to be a Spanish word: translating it to English gave “web” and “net.” And from web, “spider”… the game will go farther afield for students of higher grades, evidently. Oh, and we couldn’t connect a Spanish word to another one directly.
From my vast experience in high school Spanish class, one of the funnest (most fun?) games we played in class was called “no se,” meaning “I don’t know.” It’s very high energy game, good for learning, and great incentive to make the class behave (if that ever becomes a problem).
Here’s how it works: divide the class into two teams of equal number and assign each student of each team a number. The teacher asks a question (in either language, regarding vocab, conjugation, grammar, etc.) and calls a number. The two students with that number (one from each team) run up to the whiteboard or blackboard and scribble the answer. If a student doesn’t know, he or she writes “I don’t know” or whatever variant you decide upon, and a person from their team who knows the answer can run up and provide it. Whoever gets the right answer first gets a point. The first team to get a set number of points wins candy or points on a test or quiz. (Beware, however, the one person on each team who almost always runs up to answer the no se. Rules can be set for this.) It can get very competitive.
Considering that candy was an incredibly powerful incentive for 18 year olds, I think it would work magic for 9 and 10 year olds.
Wow, you all are quick! Thanks a lot for your responses.
The suggestions sound good. I googled the flyswatter game, and it looks like a lot of fun. I also checked out the book Keep Talking. Once again, thank you!
The hakwon isn’t very techy. The teachers have Internet access, but that’s about it. The thing is that while I’m studying for my masters in education, this is the first time I’ve taught in front of a classroom. Nothing too surprising, but it is kind of hard to think on your feet sometimes. It’s a lot of fun, though.
Since the English “r” sound is so distinctive and distant from most other “r” sounds, people often have trouble with it when learning English as a second language. I always thought an elaborate and dramatic singalong of the Police’s “Roxanne” would be good for this. There are a boatload of excellently placed r’s throughout with room for artistic license.
There are a lot of great websites out there with teaching ideas. I recommend Dave’s ESL cafe (there is a second with teaching ideas) and sendaiedu.com in particular. If you search for JET websites you will also often find ideas from people in the same basic boat as you.
In particular, I have found–
shiritori
gokiburi (cockroach) game
criss cross
Simon Says
typhoon game
Jeopardy
boggle
a paper version of Battleship
and other such games very useful as warm-ups or reviews. Just Google for these terms if you don’t know what I mean. I taught English in Japan for 2 years, albeit at the high school level. Most of these games can be adapted and used for many different grammar concepts.
For example, shiritori is the Japanese name for a blackboard game where the first person on the team writes one word–say dog, and the next person must write a word starting with the last letter–say girl. Then a word starting with l, etc. Winner is the team that writes the most words. But you can adjust this in many ways. Make it more like scattergories–teams have to write down verbs or nouns only. Make sentence shiritori–students have to create a sentence starting with the word or grammar point that you give. More later if I remember it…
How about (I don’t know the name so making one up) the blindfolded lunchbox.
Bring in a number of items with different textures, weights, feels etc. Blind fold the student and place it in their hands asking them to describe it. Fun can be had with “gross” items (warm grass jelly maybe?).
Maybe work in teams of two, one blindfolded the other the guide. The guide must navigate the blind one round the classroom only using their voice (in English)
Maybe bring in a Korean cartoon and then have the kids provide voices to match the action…make the cartoon as simple as possible oibviously (like Pokoyo for instance)
I recently got my TOEFL cert and one of the games I came up with during the course is the “So am I” game. We all (a room full of adults) played it to see how it would work, and it turned out to be great fun. It’s pretty simple so I think that children could do it as well.
Student #1 has to say "I am ________ " and fill in the blank with an adjective of phrase that is true about him. Alternately, he can say "I’m not ________ " and follow with something that describes what he is not. The student is “safe” if no other student can answer back truthfully with “so am I” or “neither am I”. The student is “out” if any other student can truthfully answer back with “so am I” or “neither am I”. The teacher is the referee for settling disputed challenges.
You can allow some variation in the “I am” statement, perhaps "I have ________ " and the response would have to be “So have I” or “neither have I”. You can be very strict if you want - if the challenge response must be “so have I” but the student makes a grammatical error and says “so am I” then the challenged student is still safe.
Students will become more familiar with the “I am - so am I” and “I’m not - neither am I” relationship, and it also serves to educate kids about how we are all much more similar that we are different (it can be really tough to come up with more than a few ways in which you are different than everybody else in a group of people).
Hiya, here’s a small tip… Most kids don’t like getting pulled out of their comfort zone, so it might be good idea if you were to have a set routine in the beginning of your classes. For example, before I teach I usually have one kid write the day and date on the board and another to take attendance. Giving kids responsibilities such as the above and even erasing the white board is a good way of getting the kids to feel involved.
Then I usually have a competitive (usually TPR - Total Physical Response) game to stir the kids up to basically get them a bit tired so during the more ‘serious’ parts of the lesson they won’t be too fiddly and will be able to sit still (well, at least not jumping around and screaming)
For games there are a lot of sources on the net, a website i often frequent is Dave’s esl cafe lot’s of games and ideas. Hope that helps
