Teaching at
preschool where English is a second language has it’s challenges, especially
when it comes to language arts. Not every lesson goes as planned, sometimes
they are not even close to my expectation. It’s difficult to engage (and keep
focused!) a bunch of 3-4 year olds, who might not even understand me most of
the time.
My favorite
lesson so far is connected to reading Jane Yolen and Mark Teague’s series How Do Dinosaurs… The children respond
to those books with sincere interest.
The winner
of the series in my pre-school classroom is How Do Dinosaurs Count to Ten?
We read this book while introducing
numbers 0-10. It’s illustrations are captivating, the rhymes are easy to repeat
and of course the magic of the dinosaurs! Each number is
associated with a different rhyme in order to help the child remember it. I
was pleased, that after a week of activities with How Do Dinosaurs Count to
Ten? each student in my class (12 children) recognized the numbers, was able to
count to 10 and they understood the order in which the numbers go. Once the
kids reached the objective and were fluent in numbers, we did a simple activity
by creating our own dinosaur sticker book at http://www.iknowthat.com/com/StickerBook?World=Dinosaurs. We
focused primarily on numbers, but this activity can be expanded to advanced
level and it’s a lot of fun for students regardless of their age.
Within that
week, by simply modeling certain behaviors (reading, playing with visual and
spatial aids) and playing games, I saw an amazing transformation in my 4-year
old students. They were confident, and proud that they could count for
themselves, and were able to ‘read’ the book.
Seeing them
so happy helps me remember that those little things in life were at one point
the most important and valuable achievements.
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