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Speaking of English enlightenment, both teachers and parents attach great importance to it. Many parents even start to teach their children English when they can’t wait to teach them English... What I admire most is that many parents have overcome many English blind spots in the process of teaching their children. If I had this motivation to learn back then, I would have been the top student himself.
get back to the topic. Today I would like to introduce to you how the American ESL teacher designs thematic teaching for children starting from 0.
good friend Shirley is an ESL teacher with 30 years of teaching experience, that is, a teacher who teaches children who are "non-native" to learn English, such as new immigrant children. In my retirement year, I brought out the English teaching materials from my entire room and asked me to choose books for my daughter. I chose a lot of picture books and matching toy games. At the same time, I found that she had twenty or thirty folders, all of which were her lesson plans. American teachers do their own teaching plans, but many of the lesson plans are ready-made, either provided by course projects like Xuele or downloaded online, so they actually prepare lessons faster.
The treasure website ESL Kids Stuff shared with you today has a large number of resources (including lesson plans) for theme teaching, which is convenient for teachers and parents to tailor-made English enlightenment courses for their children. Let’s talk to you about how to teach ESL themes based on the content of this website.
Theme teaching design
What is theme teaching?
"Thematic teaching / thematic instruction) can be traced back to the immersive teaching method in Canada in the 1960s, and was later widely used in non-native English teaching (ESL) in the United Kingdom and the United States. It emphasizes the application of language in real life, advocates the situational and lifelike language teaching, and puts language into meaningful topics to learn, which can accelerate students' memory and application of language. I have also used a lot of thematic teaching.
Why do you need to design thematic teaching?
- language is a tool. If you can’t learn English, you will just be dumb English. Create themes to give children an external environment to use language.
- Learning around a topic can continuously expand vocabulary and reproduce it repeatedly in the situation, making it more solid in the mastery of vocabulary and sentence patterns.
- theme teaching can directly break the limitations between subjects, abandon single memory of vocabulary and grammar, integrate activities such as music, physical and aesthetics into the theme, stimulate children's interest, and exercise the comprehensive application ability of language.
Whether it is teaching English or teaching Chinese to foreign countries, theme teaching is the choice of many teachers. After understanding thematic teaching, let’s talk about the contents of thematic teaching.
Theme teaching content
Theme teaching is different from unit teaching
Many people confuse theme teaching with "unit teaching". They are similar in shape but not in spirit. Units are just a framework of knowledge, or a superposition of similar content. One of the core of the theme is to focus on students and link them with life, fundamentally strengthening children's "participation" in the course.
21 common teaching topics
The 21 most common topics in English teaching are here. I am used to visual teaching and I directly use pictures instead of words
Each topic is very close to daily life, and the nouns and vocabulary covered in it accounts for more than 80% of children's daily words.
can be in line with the English courses of the Ministry of Education
In fact, many English textbooks also use theme teaching, including primary school English textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education. When the editor arranges, he has a strong sense of theme teaching and rigorous language internal logic.
(People's Education Press English First Grade 1 Volume Topic)
teaching materials are just a carrier. The content it presents is very basic, and the level that students can achieve based on their textbook knowledge is very limited.For example, the theme of "face" includes 5 words and two basic sentence patterns. To achieve a stage of comprehensive application, it is necessary to design the theme teaching in multiple levels and more comprehensively. This needs to be achieved through the teacher's lesson preparation.
Theme Teaching Details
When it comes to preparing lessons, it really talks about the "pain points" of teachers. It is not easy to prepare the lessons well. Every time I write a lesson plan, I work hard!
A high-quality thematic teaching lesson plan should at least include:
- Teaching objectives: basic vocabulary and sentence knowledge goals; listening, speaking, reading and writing ability goals.
- Teaching content: Vocabulary, sentence patterns, dialogues, chapters, etc.
- Teaching steps: Warm up, new knowledge, application, review
- Teaching methods: Achieve teaching goals through various activities such as pictures, music, videos, games, etc.
- After-class assignment: Targeted exercises designed for teaching goals
ESL Kids Stuff website has related teaching details. After entering the website, you can get free teaching details without registering an account, and you can also package and download it for everyone. The way to collect them is at the end of the article.
Detailed Example
Take the "face" text mentioned above as an example, but it is not limited to the face, but takes "body parts" as a topic.
(...The following contents of the detailed plan are omitted here)
ESL Kids Stuff provides you with 1 free lesson plans . The teaching process of each lesson plan is . Each activity clearly points to the teaching goal . More importantly, it uses visualization, music, body and other methods to mobilize children to learn. Under this classroom design, children do not feel like they are "studying", which is the so-called "education and entertainment"!
For different age groups, different teaching designs
Although they all start from 0, students of different age groups have different learning methods, and the teaching designs are naturally different. The lesson plan in ESL Kids Stuff is based on thematic teaching, and is also divided into two age groups: 3-7 years old and 8-12 years old. Teachers can choose according to their school age.
Use the outline to make the teaching more orderly
Teachers can quickly find the lesson plans they need on the website according to their teaching themes. The website developer also wrote an Syllabus (syllabus) based on the needs of some teachers, listing the teaching objectives, sentence patterns and vocabulary of each lesson, so that everyone can refer to the course order in the syllabus for teaching.
teachers can divide the content of each class into 2-4 class hours according to the level and age of the students. The syllabus has thoughtfully listed several teaching plans for everyone. Taking the theme of "Clothing" as an example, we can clearly see the specific arrangements for each teaching link in each class.
Theme Teaching Activities
We can find from the lesson plans of American teachers that teaching activities are a very important part of their ESL classroom. In the past few years, I have also noticed that they always have many novel and interesting teaching activities. What activities and games do American teachers have in class? ESL Kids Stuff helped the teachers give a very comprehensive summary. You just need to click Teaching Resources above the website to find content related to the theme teaching activities in the drop-down menu that appears.
Games&Activities (Games and Activities)
The teaching activities here are provided by front-line teachers, and are divided into four categories: classroom games, letter games, flash card games, and song games . The number of games is as high as and hundreds of , which can be said to be a "super comprehensive inventory". I feel that these games and activities are enough for several years!
There are detailed introductions to activities and games in each category. In addition, teachers can also choose the required activities based on their teaching themes.
Holidays/Festivals (festive teaching resources)
The four major festivals in the West (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Easter) are also indispensable content for ESL theme teaching. The teaching resources such as games/activity, lesson plans, flash cards, work papers, songs, picture books, etc. that teachers need are here.
Teaching Tips (Teaching Skills)
There are also practical teaching skills that teachers need most, covering almost all aspects of daily teaching. The introduction in each category is very detailed and is all practical!
Online Games (online game)
The teaching activities introduced earlier are all offline, and we can also find many online interactive games on this website. These games can be used to practice English and mathematics, and the operation is very easy and you can play it by clicking it. These games in
ESL Kids Stuff are all from the external network hyperlinks. I put the URLs of these websites below to facilitate everyone to explore more online game resources by themselves.
http://www.learningplanet.com/index.asp
https://www.primarygames.com/games.php
https://billybearsplaygroundgame.wordpress.com/
https://www.crazygames.com/game/text-twist
Theme teaching resources
ESL Kids Stuff website not only has theme teaching lesson plans and activities, but also has many supporting teaching resources, and the content is also very rich. Most of the resources in it need to be registered as a member to obtain, but some of them can be downloaded and tried for free.
Flashcards (Flashcard)
flashcards are an indispensable resource for teachers to teach and will be used in almost every class. The pictures provided by ESL Kids Stuff are all high-definition and watermark-free. In addition to making flash cards, we usually use them to make courseware.
Worksheets (worksheet)
worksheets is also a very important part of learning English. Children can develop language skills through different ways such as coloring, drawing, practicing and guessing riddles. These worksheets can be used as review tools, can be attached to the walls of the classroom, or as homework, and Quiet Time or Centers Time in the classroom can't be the best.
Craft Sheets (Handmade Materials)
Foreign teachers really like to let children do manual work in class. In addition to exercising their hands-on skills, they think this is a good way to help children internalize new vocabulary. Students quietly focus on their cutting, pasting, coloring and glueing activities in the classroom, and there is a huge sense of accomplishment when they complete their work. All handmade materials on the website are also classified by topic, so that teachers can find them on demand.
Songs (songs)
ESL Kids Stuff has a video, and students can sing and dance with the teacher in the video. There are also free downloadable English/American audio, accompaniment, posters and lyrics, as well as specific teaching activities.
Take the song "What Can You Do" as an example to show you the song resources:
ESL Kids Stuff's current main profit comes from the excellent children's song videos it produces, so there are only 4 songs free, and other songs need to be purchased to watch. I bought a membership three years ago and it costs about 50 US dollars. However, I later discovered another treasure, which contains children's songs that are comparable to it, which can be obtained for free. I will share the next article with you.
Classroom Readers (Level Reading Book)
ESL Kids Stuff also provides everyone with rich picture book resources, because hierarchical reading is also an important content in ESL teaching. These picture books cover vocabulary and sentence patterns of different topics, match the course syllabus, and are divided into four different level levels: Starter, Level1, Level2, and Level3. So teachers can find picture books according to the teaching topic or level.
is different from many current graded books. The same picture book story of ESL Kids Stuff will appear at different levels, but the content is different. Embedded Reading (layered teaching) is used in the most popular TCI (intelligibility input teaching method). Its founder Laurie Clarq is also a training expert in our TCI workshop. At present, Embedded Reading resources are still very scarce.
Search Results
Web results
Through the following two different level picture books of "The Hungry Snake", you can intuitively feel the characteristics of the story in Embedded Reading (layered teaching). There are currently only two free resources in this set of resources.
Teacher Resources (Teacher Resources)
In addition to the teaching resources introduced to you earlier, ESL Kids Stuff also thoughtfully prepared some common documents for classroom management for teachers, including 12 English awards, 4 attendance forms, 1 teaching record form and 2 English lesson plan templates, all of which can be downloaded for free, and are available in WORD and PDF formats.
ESL Certificates (English Certificates)
also has attendance sheets, teaching record sheets, English lesson plan templates, etc.
Although this part of the resources are not all free, it gives us a good teaching reference. If teaching is designed according to this idea, the classroom will be complete, interesting and effective.
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