Especially when teaching children a new language, we langauge teachers have to stay creative to awaken and retain their interest, to help them to comprehend new concepts and help them remember new vocabulary, phrases and grammatical structures. While text books and worksheets are a key element of language teaching in children who can already read and write well in their mother tongue, when teaching younger learners, we need to rely on other resources. My youngest language learners are 18 months old, but right up to the age of 8-9 years old, I teach primarily spoken language. I firmly believe that communication skills are key when motivating young learners to keep learning, and listening / speaking is where they can make the most effective progress without getting bogged down with spellings, capitalisation, etc. Experience with my own bilingual child has proven that reading and writing skills are acquired and honed much more easily once listening and speaking are strong.
Recently, I have used fun projects such as growing cress seeds, exchanging video messages with “real live children” from the target language country, ordering ice cream at the local ice cream parlour, enjoying a meal and sampling many unknown foods in the process, taking a trip to the bakery, holding a small fashion show, putting on a short play, and doing sport in the target language to help my young learners grasp what we are talking about more easily – and most importantly, to make the language more memorable for them.
My current challenge is to teach some wonderful kindergarten-age learners of German all about Fasching (aka Karneval – a concept that is non-existent in most of their home countries). We started by looking at a good old “Wimmelbuch” picture of a kindergarten Fasching party (which enabled them to demonstrate their knowledge of animals, colours, numbers, toys and many other things they spotted in the busy picture), then we watched a couple of short videos of parades and dance routines. We have of course also been singing some popular child-friendly songs, and we will be completing the module with a fancy dress Fasching party complete with Kreppel (jam doughnuts), streamers, music and of course shouts of “Helau” while I throw a few sweets into the crowd of excited faces! Maybe some of them will be inspired to go to a local parade. Maybe some of them still haven’t got a clue what on earth I am talking about…! But either way I have been able to incorporate some reinforcement of vocabulary and sentence structures we have encountered previously as well as having fun with the children, both of which are valuable elements of the learning process.
So, in line with the German saying “Probieren geht über Studieren”, I will keep digging deep to find creative, hands-on ways of helping my young language learners get to grips with English and German. Do share any projects you have tried that were successful…!