I am back with couple of ideas and a game and a more settled lesson plan for preschool english class 🙂
It’s been 7 – S E V E N – weeks since we started teaching online… 7 long weeks. I guess we all have learnt so much.
For me, I can tell you that my lessons have a kind of routine now. As I always say, kids love routines and I should admit that I set these routines automatically (professional deformation) 😀
- We start with mini book time
- Then, if I have something fun -like a game or video- I continue with that
- and most of the time I have a book page activity
- A short chant or a TPR activity followed by quick reminders for the next lesson and bye bye!
If you haven’t read the first 3 blog posts about teaching online lessons with very young learners, you can click on the “Online Lessons” tag and find more useful tips and step by step lessons plans.
I wanna explain these steps in a more detailed way (see it as my sample lesson plan for preschool):
Mini Book Time Routine: I’m recording our story time routine, uploading the stories to YouTube and sending parents the link so that my kids can watch the video and have our story time routine back. Thanks to these videos during our online lessons I only focus on question and answer activities. I wrote 2 posts about this routine and attached the YouTube videos, too. You can read more about this story time routine by clicking on the “Story Time” tag or you can have a look at the introductory post Mini Book Time with Miss Islah | YouTube Video #1
Fun Time: The flow our your lessons should mostly create a wave of “less fun / no fun, then fun” stuff 😀 If you have a balanced structure like that, your students will enjoy your lessons.
As, you can see in my very serious and scientific scheme of a lesson flow, you will see that starting the lesson with fun and ending it with fun always works! You may or may not have something fun in between, but especially how you end your lesson is crucial. It can be a song, a video or a brain break just like GoNoodle! Anything that make your kids have a little fun break will make them want more of you 😀 Next lesson, they will wait for you at the door – believe me 😉
This week was our revision week (our topic was “Feelings”), so I wanted to play a revision game. “What’s missing?” was a good choice as it was easy to prepare and each kid would have a turn to speak and participate 😀
It’s not the best game I have prepared. I took these images from another ppt I found at islcollective made by mada_1, copied and pasted them in a row) but it was useful and you can use it as a template if you want. You can download the Feelings What’s Missing PowerPoint Game here.
How to Play: We conduct our online lessons in our school online system which is called “SmartClass”. We just create a virtual class and kids come and attend our lessons. So here the system lets you upload your slides there and without sharing your screen you show your powerpoints or any kind of document you want.
If you use zoom or something else it doesn’t matter how you share the PPT, because I didn’t use any animation, slide effect or move to make it complicated to manage during an online lesson; I kept it simple… Just click and change the slide. In one slide there are 4 feelings, on the next one there is one missing 😀 Ta daaa!
Book Activity: As I said in one of my previous blog posts, I’ve started to use our course book English Play Box 3 during our online lessons. If you have a course book, you can simply ask them to take their book and pencils and wait for your instructions. I mostly choose the simple “Listen and circle – Listen and color – Listen and draw – Listen and tick – listen and number” kind of activities. They are easy to manage online and also they don’t take too much time. If you don’t have a course book you can still have them draw something and show to you.
Ending the Lesson: Normally I would end my lessons with our Gonoodle Time routine; but I haven’t done it so far because of technical problems. The problem is ME I guess 😀 I could’t make kids hear the songs… So I just dropped it there, but I’m planning to have a trial lesson with one of my coworkers. Because kids have been asking me about Gonoodle and I feel that I broke our beautiful routine.
So instead of Gonoodle, I ask them to join a chant with me or have a very short TPR activity like “touch your nose, jump 2 times, show me an angry face” then, I tell them that “English time is over” and next time we will have this game, that activity or this book page etc…
For now i follow this lesson plan for preschool english class and my lessons are more or less like this. When I think about the many following weeks that we will be teaching online, I feel like I’m gonna have a heart attack but easy…. just taking it easy… Everything’s gonna be alright…
Keep Calm and Stay Present…
