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Working as a primary teacher can have its highs and lows! One day all 24 of your children are on your wavelength, throwing ideas at you like there is no tomorrow, and the next day…it’s as if you were speaking Chinese to them. When working wit...
Working as a primary teacher can have its highs and lows! One day all 24 of your children are on your wavelength, throwing ideas at you like there is no tomorrow, and the next day…it’s as if you were speaking Chinese to them. When working within an international setting, it can be a challenge to keep children engaged with English, understanding the complicated terminology and being excited about writing a big piece of text.
Over the recent terms, I have been working solidly with my class to enhance their love of reading and writing, and I finally feel that I have succeeded! Although saying this, we always still have our up and down days. Moving along, the way in which I have found success is to ensure a close link between class book (reading), the topic in which you are covering in history or geography (even science), and the text type you are teaching for English. For example: we are currently in a history module, we have chosen our theme as crime and punishment, our book is Horrible Histories and our text types (personal monologue & discussion) link as closely as possible to history, our reading book and crime and punishment.
By linking all topic areas closely together, the children become more engaged and their level of understanding increases. Through higher level questioning, such as asking the effect of a piece of text and the what if we changed this/added this/took away that, gets children thinking outside of the so called box.
Another aspect that I have been using, is not teaching standalone SPAG lessons, yes teaching SPAG is important, but if you cover a text type over two weeks, you are able to filter in important aspects of the curriculum into day to day English lessons. This therefore builds up the children’s bank of knowledge over the course of two weeks, and their re-call, class discussions and engagement increases. The handy thing with covering curriculum pin-points over various weekly periods, means you are able to revisit throughout the year to ensure that their application of the aspect is done without prior thought. Children should also, after a few weeks of working on two week schedules, recall a success criteria dependable on the various text types worked on.
But what if your child doesn’t read, you ask? Not to fear, through using this method of two week intervals, your child wants to learn as much of their book as possible! Even linking it into a reading comprehension exercise for homework, changes the way they look at reading! For children to see a love of reading, it must come from home and the teacher too. To get excited about a book, to act parts out, to create scripts, comic strips and change the stories completely, sparks an intrinsic interest to really get to know what they are reading!
As many have researched, tried and tested and understood, another extremely important aspect surrounding increasing a love of English, is to model! Modelling is at the forefront of my teaching method, I find it relatively easy due to a love of writing, but teachers and parents who fear putting pen to paper should take a deep breath and keep calm. The way in which I model is by putting a word, a small phrase or a sentence down on my board. I then ask them what should come next, do other children agree with the new sentence, could we change it again and up-level it further? Could we babble gabble, pen relay, Chinese whisper adjectives, fronted adverbials, clauses or punctuation? Really engage children in here, this is the time that they can parrot off you, off other children! Do table writes, peer writing and assessment, piece together a puzzle of a story, adding in extra information to make it flow!
The possibilities for enhancing a child’s love for English is endless, even those children with EAL/ELL will soon face up to the challenge of learning a new language. Act with them, differentiate comprehension texts, and find audio books in their mother tongue language!
Overall, teaching is a challenge, we struggle, we cry and we most definitely shout! But English should be a subject that we promote a love for, to pick up a book, to understand the text, to take those ideas and concepts and write it into a lined paper book, that’s the transfer of knowledge and for many children a real transfer of love! For the love of English lets: communicate, model, differentiate and make English more exciting! Take the fears away and allow them to just write.
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