LISTENING, ORAL WORK, READING, AND WRITING

                                 LISTENING

"No child would spend a whole lesson listening to the teacher and understanding everything; It is obvious that LISTENING is the skill that kids acquire before reading." (Taken from Teaching English To Children)

In our practicum we were dealing with this skill more often that the other skills we’ll talk about later on.

Our groups of kids were from 4 to 6 years old, and that is why most of them can’t read or write. One of the biggest challenges we had was the distractions from the outside of the classroom (The noise from other kids and from the streets.) It was difficult for us to talk in way kids could listen because they hardly ever pay attention to what the teacher says.

Activities developed related to Listening

-        *Simon Says

-        *Follow me ( The train of Numbers)

-        *Sing along

-        *Listen and color    

                 ORAL WORK

“Speaking is perhaps the most demanding

 skill for the teacher to teach.”

"Sometimes, when dealing with this skill, we don’t know what kids want to say. Especially when you want your Ss to think about English as something that’s more than a “Mean of communication.

“The ideas that were shown in the “Teaching English To children” book helped us to know more about dealing with kids. It was better for me because l taught an introductory course to English. It gave me some ideas to approach children and teach them with a better method.” --- Cristian Castro

“Some of the challenges l had while teaching kids and using this skill were that most of the children wanted to say a lot of things, but they had no idea how to say them in English; they would try to change some words from Spanish by adding “ation” to the end of it. That’s definitely one of the challenges l had during this time.” --- Vanessa Martínez  

“I did almost all of the activities presented in the book (Using a mascot, puppets, silhouettes, etc. and it helped me to motivate kids to produce the language easily. I would say the name of the animal or the object l was holding in my hands, and they’d tell me the name the way they heard it. I didn’t want to change the activities because they already had stablished the lesson plan for the subject.” – Erika Argueta

                  WRITING

Because our kids were not that able to write big amouts of sentences, we didn't want to include any kind of activity that invilved this skill. Erika's kids from K-6 were the only ones who knew how to write some words; that's why she did some activities with them in which they had to write a lot. This one was by far the hardest part of all we dealed with.