CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning)

During the last years the interest in CLIL has been increasing significantly in Europe. The CLIL refers to situations where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with two main goals: the learning of content and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language. But it doesn’t consists of just a translation of the lesson content into another language. The key issue is that the learner is gaining new knowledge about the 'non-language' subject while he is using (and learning) the foreign language. In this way, language is used as a medium for learning content, and the content is used in turn as a resource for learning languages. So CLIL promotes content learning to an equal position to that of foreign language learning.

Personally, I think that it’s a great idea, because sometimes teaching a language to children can be boring and non meaningful for them (sometimes students are only learning vocabulary and grammatical aspects). So this way, we can teach any curriculum area at the same time that they learn and use English in a real situation. With CLIL, the language and the non language content are placed without specifying the importance of one over the other. So it may be the best approach to incorporate a foreign language and to promote multilingualism and language diversity, so important in the fast changing world that we are living nowadays.

Developmental Carachteristics of Preschoolers

In a previous post, I talked about the importance of meeting individual needs of our students, teaching them bearing in mind the individual differences between them. This differences can be caused by different factors, as their social and familiar background and their own personality.

But today I want to talk about a factor related to the developmental characteristics of our children, which will be different among them, depending on their age and their birth order. For this reason, as teachers, we have to know what can we expect from our children depending on their developmental stage. I have done a table with some characteristics that I found very important to keep in mind as English teachers:

Of course there are more developmental characteristics that I suggest you to check, because it could be very useful for you.

As a last idea, I would like to say that we mustn’t underestimate children’s capacities. Sometimes we don’t ask them some task thinking that they won’t be able to do it. But you would be surprised of the things they can actually do… 

Teaching and Learning Management

This week I have read an article called "Rethinking Classroom Management". Just as the title says, this article aims at defining and describing this concept from a different perspective. The main idea is that behavioral issues should be addressed through teaching and learning considerations based on the idea of behavior for learning rather than beahavior management. So maybe instead of classroom management we should talk about teaching and learning management, which is wider than the traditional concept. It includes three interrelated areas:

Organizational issues. What kind of working atmosphere is needed to reach the goals? It includes the rights and duties, that must be clear and explicit, building them up together with our students. The process must be dialogic and interactive rather than a one way process (it's not only the teachers who set the rules). One idea that I find very interesting is the notion that rules should describe desired behaviors rather than list unwanted ones.

Curriculum issues. What do I have to teach? What methods am I going to use? What am I going to do to involve students so that they are fully engaged and not bored and disruptive? Teaching implies being able to establish goals in terms of what to teach (curriculum) and how to teach (methodology).

Social issues. The climate in the classroom is crucial when determining the quality of learning that takes place. Pupils learn more and better if they are in a safe, secure and accepting classroom.

Any isolated decision within an area will no ensure any learning progress. An integration of organisational, curriculum and social issues is required to guarantee a successful teaching and learning management. So these decisions must be coherent: if children are often asked to work cooperatively, it will make sense to distribute tables and chairs in groups. If relationships among students need to be improved, try to avoid competitive games as a learning strategy.

Using Puppets in the Preschool Classroom

Sometimes children may be used to hear you speaking in their maternal language, so it could be a bit confusing for them to hear you suddenly speaking in English. For this reason, some teachers introduce an intermediary object between them and their students in the English classroom. It can be any kind of object like a magic hat, which will make that, every time that you wear it, you automatically speak in English. However, I prefer to use puppets to direct the English classroom. They are magical for preschool students, being a really good way to get the kids attention. I think that puppets encourage students to communicate more and are great teaching tools in the preschool classroom.

The first day of class it's important to introduce him as a new friend who is coming from far away to visit us. His name has to be in English and it would be great that he has the same age as children. We can show them where are he from and talk a little bit about his country. We must tell them that he speaks another language and we can only talk to him in English. 

Some teachers use the puppet only as a reference (the puppet whispers them things that he wants to say and the teacher repeat it to the classroom). But the most effective puppets talk directly to the children and even introduce lessons. In this case, teachers use a different tone of voice to speak through the puppet.

Create rituals with the puppets. Children respond well to repetition, so use it to your advantage. Every time your bring out the puppet you can say the same thing and you can do the same thing. First day of class the puppet can introduce himself to the students, using the main phrases to introduce ourselves ("hello", "how are you?", "my name is..."). And we can also teach the song that will become a part of the daily routine. This is an interesting video that can give you some ideas about teaching English with puppets:

When not in use, give the puppet a special seat and we can use it the days that children are not in work as a way to get their attention again. Kids will love him so we can use it as a reference ("Mr. Bear is very proud of you", "Mr. Bear don't like kids who hit their peers"...).

I have seen it and the result is amazing ! I really recommend you try it in your classroom :)

The Benefits of Blogging as a Student/Teacher

This is the first time that I am writing a blog. I have only writen a few entries but I am realizing that blogging offers me a lot of benefits. 

Firstly, blogging gives me the opportunity to express myself by writing about my personal reflections and ideas about what I'm learning.  It's like my personal diary, where I can post things that I consider interesting to remember as a teacher. So, this blog is my personal storage of resources, information and personal experiences related to teaching practices in childhood education. Here I can store all this information, without occupying unnecessary space in papers. In this way, I can have my thoughts and knowledge ordered without losing it.

Also, all this information can be useful for other people. Every time that I post something in my blog I am sharing it with all of you, who can comment my posts. So I can get your responses to my questions, your viewpoints and your thoughts. By receiving your feedback, I can learn a lot of new things from you too, getting different points of view and a more critical vision about what I'm sharing.

Moreover, blogging is a good way to be connected with other education colleagues in order to share knowledge, resources and experiences that can be useful for all of us. We have to be constantly recycling ourselves because our society is constantly changing. And blogging can make it possible to discover other points of view and other ideas and ways to teach.

Differentiated Instruction in the Preschool Classroom

This week I have read an article called “Meeting individual needs with young learners”, which explores the characteristics of a differentiated instruction teaching model. This methodology consists in teaching students bearing in mind the individual differences among them. Each student has his own level of ability, his strengths, his weaknesses and his preferences and interests, so everyone in the class should be treated differently. 

The authors of the article suggest some methods and strategies to approach to this teaching model. I have classified some of them thinking about the different components involved in the teaching process which I consider very important in a differenciated instruction model:

1# One strategy related to the content that we want to teach, is to include varied tasks of different difficulty levels and provide meaningful work for students who finish assignments or class work earlier or faster than others. Also, it may be interesting to provide multiple ways and materials to work the same subject.

2# Another example related to the learning process that I find interesting is that students work in groups. In this type of activities, students work together and support each other in working toward a common goal, so students can contribute to the best of their individual characteristics and strengths and they can learn from each other. 

- One strategy is to group the students according to interests. Having all the students who like animals reading a story about animals and all the students who like monsters reading a story about monsters will promote interest and productivity. 

- Another strategy is to group the students according to abilities. One great way to do this is to put a student who is just learning English in the same group as someone who has an advanced level. The advanced students can help the lower level students while the lower level students are helping to reinforce the concepts to the advanced ones.

3# Related to the products of the teaching process, teachers can use different ways to assess the students comprehension. If you have told a story and you want to know if a student have understand it, you can ask him to tell you about what happened in the story. But if your student likes to draw, maybe you can ask him to draw you a picture of the story you just read.

4# One last factor to keep in mind is the learning environment. Early education classrooms are designed to provide children with a variety of experiences throughout the day. Some students learn better by moving around and interacting. Other students are more shy and prefer to work alone. Make sure there are spaces in your classroom that are designated for quiet activities as well as interactive ones. Your learning environment should make all students feel safe and positive to get the most out of them.

With this article I have learned that to be effective with differentiation, teachers must find a way to meet the needs of all the students in their classroom. So we have to talk with the students, asking them their opinions and seeing how things are going and finding out what they are interested in. Teachers still need to recognize that children learn differently. We have to create multiple paths so that students with different abilities and interests can develop themselves.

Classroom Daily Routines

One of the responsibilities of a teacher is to provide a structured environment in which students could build confidence in themselves. That means getting, setting and keeping a routine. Especially on how the class starts and ends. In this way, students will know exactly what to expect as soon as they enter the classroom and they will feel more safe and secure. Also, routines make it easier for youngest students to learn and achieve more, because they are repeating the same thing day by day.

Routines can include usual classroom habitudes (how will the children enter the room, where will they place their backpacks...), but as English teachers we can create our own classroom routines.

For example, I suggest you to start each English lesson singing a couple of songs.

Good morning song

It may be interesting to start the English lesson every day with a welcome song. You can invent one, but there is an interesting example:

"Are you happy?"

To continue with class routine, you can ask some question like "Are you happy?" and children must answer correctly. And then you can sing a song related to the question. In this case, we can sing "If you're happy and you know it". But we can introduce anything that we want to work with them as a routine and find or create a song related to the subject.

This is a way to get the students attention while they are learning vocabulary. I think it is  an interesting routine for every day lessons.

Teaching English to Preschool Children

I'm working in a school where I am learning how to teach English to youngest children. There I'm learning some important tips to keep in mind:

Learn survival and functional words

We have to avoid abstract concepts and concentrate on concrete real items that the children can understand. We can start with familiar topics such as colors, numbers, animals, body parts, the weather, days of the week and short everyday sentences and phrases. However, there are more important things to learn too. They must know how to ask for food or a bathroom, because this is vocabulary related to their urgent needs. 

Hello	Goodbye	Inside
Outside	Yes	No
Bathroom	Eat	Drink
Stop	Come here	Look

Also, they must know and understand functional words and phrases that we will say them day by day (Are you ready?, Stand up, Sit down, Stop, Try again...).We don’t have to teach them by formal instruction. Children learn very easily, so we can just speak slowly all the time in English. This way and by repetition, they will become familiar with all this vocabulary. Using it in real situations will allow that these expressions and vocabulary become meaningful for them.

Teach informally

Preschoolers are not able to sit for long periods of time and listen to us. We have to take advantage of indirect teachable moments. For example, while walking around the school, we can use usual expressions and vocabulary that may be useful in that moment. We can say them "silence, there's people working" or "stand in line".

Sing and dance

The rhythms, repetition, and movements of music will help us and the children build vocabulary in English. These are great for movement and frequent repetition of vocabulary and phrases. This way, they will be singing a song in English at the same time that they will be learning vocabulary by repetition. There are a lot of funny and useful songs to teach English to children. One day I will post some songs here in my blog :)

Playing and learning

Children love games and stories so you can capture their attention while building their vocabulary and language. For kids of this age, we can use board-type games or interactive games with miming, movement, dressing up or guessing games.

Story-telling

It may seem difficult to teach English by story-telling, because children of this age don’t understand Enlglish yet. But this is a false idea, because they can learn a lot of vocabulary and expressions through the stories. Stories are a faboulous resource for preschoolers, who will want to hear the same tales told over and over again. We just have to use a lot of pictures, because they are key to understanding. We have to use as much vocal and facial expression as possible, and acting out the story with gestures. We can use colourful illustrations to help them understand, and act parts of the stories afterwards with role playing games.

It is fine if the children use their own language to reply or ask, but we must pre-taught them the key vocabulary and try that they use them as time goes by.

I hope that it will be useful to you !

Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0

We can take advantage that we are living in a digital world to use Web 2.0 tools to teach our students. It is a creative resource, easy to learn and very catchy for the children, that give us diverse and rich solutions to motivate them.


On the one hand, we can use Web 2.0 apps to educate students to use these digital tools for their own learning. Everyday students are using social medias like Facebook, Twitter or Blogger in their life outside of school. The goal is that they use all these applications in an academic manner, establishing relationships with other students, and creating knowledge through those connections.

On the other hand, we can use them as teaching resources during our lessons. We can do creative presentations with online applications like Slideshare or Prezi. But we can also teach a lot of new tools that can be useful to learn English. There are a lot of applications that we can use. For example, I have recently learned about an online app. called Storybird, which allows us to sign up using a teacher account. This tool allows us to write a story using beautiful images from different illustrators. It's very simple. Someone starts a Storybird by writing a few words or grabbing a few images; then another student add more words and pictures, and then another one. This way, all students can write a collaborative classroom book by making their own contribution. And they can do it sitting side-by-side or from their own house, as housework. This way we will be catching the students attention at the same time that they will be learning to write in English correctly.

However, we have to pay attention in the way we use these applications. We must be sure that we are familiar with the applications that we are going to show to our students before we can use them in class. The more prepared we are, the better. Once we know the application very well, we can show it to the class. But before they start to use it, they must think about what they are going to do with this tool (with Storybird they have to think first about the story they want to write). So they have to prepare the activity before they can use it.

And of course, as teachers, we can use Web 2.0 to teach ourselves, by sharing, researching and finding new ideas and resources from other teachers and colleagues.

All about me and this English Preschool corner

Welcome to my English blog !

My name is Marina and I'm an Early Childhood Education student from Barcelona. I love cooking, reading, traveling, learning new things and going out with my friends. I enjoy listening to good music and I have photography as a hobby.

I started studying Psychology, but 3 years later I started to work with children as a monitor in a nursery, and I loved it so much that I knew that I had to be a teacher. 

I love working with children and watching them grow and learn. I think that teaching is one of the most beautiful, interesting and challenging opportunities anyone could ever have. I believe that teaching is a way to contribute to a better future. It gives children the right to question and to think for themselves. And Early Childhood Education helps them to develop the fundamentals of learning. 

Kids of this age are developing language skills, and they quickly absorb whatever they hear. For this reason, I think it is the best age to start teaching foreign languages as English. The reason why I have created this blog is to collect and share resources, information and news related to teaching English to younger learners. I hope it will be useful to you too!