Resources
A list of useful resources to help you teach younger learners.
Game Design For Young Learners – Martin Sedaghat (JALT 2022 Conference)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/10L1Z_rzFGY_4YamwyxMTZw_fYqe3lcfx/view?usp=share_link
Presenter resources from the 21st Century Language Teaching Conference held on October 2nd, 2022
Here are links to some of the slides and resources from our presenters:
Developing Intercultural Understanding Through Picturebooks (Emily MacFarlane and Martin Sedaghat)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G-feIwx2tb5Cn4yd_YlOAufmWa2JAN4v/view?usp=sharing
How to Teach Programming to Young Learners in English (Amy Braun)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ciz12ZuTZni3_UgL9K9nB4YPlr4vCF0z/view?usp=sharing
Inclusive teaching: addressing the needs of different students in the English lesson (Penny Ur workshop)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y0DdODBpAFL8CL6xv1nIHezN30Y67vXN/view?usp=sharing
Perceptions and attitudes of Japanese elementary school 6th grade students towards corpus-based activities in the EFL classroom (Martin Spivey)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZWXu7_cdEHZ3t3BnMd-9dzbVqc526QWN/view?usp=sharing
Planning in the Moment: A child-led approach to Early Years and how it can be successfully applied in an international or ESL environment (Dale Berry)
Playing Hybrid Bingo to support speech to text learning in EFL classrooms (Chaya Bluma Gadenyan)
https://bit.ly/emglit-hybrid_bingo
Reading is Still Fun(damental): Encouraging Reluctant Readers with 21st Century Technology (Jermaine Gordon-Mizusawa)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bm3_oThllnmaNFDsoxrQrrqwU4NapRYy/view?usp=sharing
The Communicative Grammar Approach: A Happy Medium (Erica Iwasaki)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TlIyrDCfqreyw0-ndTq4lX8oj5MHEVd2/view?usp=sharing
Using learning-rich games with young learners (Penny Ur keynote)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yXYxUbmAyvryJ8K8Xr2bu3NVhbgvhZS0/view?usp=sharing
Two Activities for High School/ New Course of study for Elementary School
GREAT GAME IDEAS
We found this cool site with some great game ideas for your classroom. Check it out!
PLAY
It is more serious than you think. Play is like so many other things in life. We know that it is beneficial, but we don’t take it seriously. We either don’t know the specifics of how or why it is good to do or we compare it to other activities we need to devote our time to and it doesn’t win out. It is easily postponed or substituted with some more meaningful activity.
I just recently listened to Press Play, the March 27th podcast from the TED Radio Hour from NPR. In this episode Stuart Brown a psychiatrist and researcher for the National Institute for Play talked about how important play is in our lives. It is especially important for young children for their cognitive, social, emotional and physical development, but it is also important for people of all ages, including adults. He emphasized the importance of play in developing problem solving skills. He went on to say that the opposite of play is depression. He didn’t give a clear definition of what constitutes play, but he did explain that if the purpose for doing the action is more important than the act itself, then it probably isn’t play.
Play is the ultimate flow experience, so as teachers how can we integrate play into our lessons. To be honest, I’m not sure how, if the purpose of the action can’t be more important than the act itself. It is so ingrained in me as a teacher to have a well defined objective for every action I do or my students do in class. Every game and activity has a goal and I am there to help them and keep them on track using English. How can it truly be play if the purpose is for the students to learn and use English a language that they would never choose on their own to use during play?I am intrigued by the challenge. I may not be able to create a completely natural play situation in my EFL classes, but I can try. I have witnessed in my classes moments when students were playing a game and the purpose of using English disappeared into the background and only the game and play remained. Although the students were using English, they weren’t focused on it. They were focused on the game. Those are exciting times for an English teacher. The goal is to engineer the language learning and activity structure to make that possible. It is not easy, but worth the effort. Although it may be artificial play according to Stuart Brown’s idea of what constitutes play, as an English teacher I can’t ignore the fact that students come to my classroom with a goal to learn English. I believe that in an educational setting, goal-oriented play is valid, but to make it more effective we should emphasize the play to the students and keep the goal to ourselves. Now I am off to enjoy a weekend full of play!
PHONICS RESOURCES
Phonics presentation video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQsNeCUclx8
Phonics presentation slides:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rEI351zkx-JFfkbNUVmIH7qZvEHNavwDfKCCZBIQwtA/edit?usp=sharing
Memory card game:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/178kJLigXctACrYoivGURslkOY_X5-P6eOmTIaZFn0x4/edit?usp=sharing
Rhyme cards:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/118_cjLgmLRt_0J0kB8Br1tL7XAX3qPri7zkEFjjXGsU/edit?usp=sharing
Clip cards folder:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1_OCv4hB4vTjyWOABiHvJe3aSQXFemKek?usp=sharing
Bingo cards folder:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VNTcEV9Maqx6DxBsqr3rWkBvPNIz22X0?usp=sharing
Bottle cap spelling cards:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1692dooCw4zXdZzOHeLjmQz69CcJV4lpR?usp=sharing
Minimal pairs:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RYRn53M6ZeuqsngSwSpXzA8hIDzM9adgFP_Vyf0_LVw/edit?usp=sharing
Silly sentences:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rta16AtdRev-E7nw7SoYfU5M1TIS9n8dRaUkHKKRcdw/edit?usp=sharing
Phonics ladder:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uDhuj0DhnK8gm5JZSL43s_YsshB5rKSpjbUtZthTwAc/edit?usp=sharing