How to Help A Child be Successful in Kindergarten

Your child’s first year of school should be a fun and exciting time. Children who are comfortable with and prepared for this first school experience are more likely to have rewarding and productive years, and therefore associate positive feelings with education. Since parents are children’s first and most important teachers, you can play a key role in preparing your children for a successful school experience by pre-exposing them to key concepts they will experience in school. This can be done in a fun, enjoyable manner by making everyday play experiences learning experiences as well.

New learning builds on prior knowledge, therefore the more exposure or background a child has with a concept the easier it is for new learning and deeper comprehension to occur. Providing your child with pre-exposure to concepts such as the alphabet, numbers, following directions, listening, reading, cutting, tracing, etc. will help them feel more comfortable and confident when they experience these similar concepts in school, thus better enabling learning to occur. Schools are becoming more academic, dependent on standardized tests, and fast-paced. Giving your children some familiarity with concepts they will encounter can help lessen the anxiety and stress that often accompany these experiences. Children who are overly stressed or uncomfortable are less likely to be able to concentrate and learn.

Children have a natural motivation to learn and a curiosity about the world. You can enhance and nurture this natural motivation by making enjoyable play experiences learning experiences as well.

For example, children’s games are great resources for combining learning with physical activity. Duck, Duck, Goose can be a way of reinforcing concepts such as the alphabet by having children say the name of a letter in place of the word, duck, and a word that begins with that letter in place of the word, goose.

Hide and Seek can become a learning experience by hiding numbers, letters, colors, your child’s name, phone number, address, etc. around the house and asking your child to find them.

Simon Says is a great game to practice following directions and positional words such as on, above, below, etc.

Bingo can be used to reinforce number recognition, letter recognition, the difference between upper case and lower case letters, letter sounds, colors, etc.

You can have a treasure hunt while shopping, driving, or at home by seeing how many letters, numbers, colors, or shapes your child can find.

You can also play I Spy where you state, “I spy with my little eye something that is”, and you describe a letter, number, shape, color, etc. that you can plainly see. Your child then tries to guess what you are describing. Your child can also take a turn describing something (this helps develop verbal skills).

Children’s individual interests can also be incorporated into learning experiences.

Blocks or Lego’s can be used to teach patterns (have them build towers with alternating colors), counting, sorting (separate the blocks by colors, shapes, size), etc.

If your child likes to color, have them create rainbow tracings of letters or numbers by tracing them with as many colors as possible.

Play dough can be made into shapes, letters, and numbers.

An interest in cars and trucks can be used when learning how to trace by telling your child to keep his car (crayon or pencil) on the road (whatever is being traced).

An interest in animals or dinosaurs can be used when learning how to cut with scissors by relating the opening and closing of the scissors to the opening and closing of an animal’s mouth. You can pretend the animal is “eating” the lines on the paper.

Your child’s surroundings can also play a part in preparing them for school. Providing a number and variety of books for your child and taking time to read to them is one of the most important things you can do for their education. Reading to a child teaches them vocal skills, vocabulary, listening skills, left-to-right orientation, cause and effect, knowledge about the world around them, and pre-reading skills. Most importantly, it instills a love for reading and books which will benefit them throughout their entire education. After all, every subject (even math) requires reading.

Our brain absorbs information from our surroundings on a conscious and unconscious level, and between 80-90% of all information absorbed by the brain is visual. Therefore, providing visual displays in your child’s room or elsewhere can actually aide in learning. Things such as the alphabet, colors, numbers, etc. can be hung up or displayed in places where your child will see them. Even magnetic letters on the refrigerator can aide in retention and learning. This is why many schools have plenty of visuals displayed in the halls and classrooms.

Young children can also learn many concepts through music. For example, they usually learn their abc’s by the alphabet song. There are many children’s tapes available that teach concepts through music. Playing these while in the car or while your children play can aide them in learning. Even though they might not be singing along or seem like they are even paying attention, subconscious learning can be occurring.

You may also want to practice separating from your child for short periods of time, such as enrolling in a program or play group or having them spend time with a babysitter. Separation anxiety can be traumatic for some children if they are not used to being away from their parents, and this anxiety can inhibit their ability to learn and relax while in school.

Lastly, no matter what methods you try with your child, the most important thing to remember is to make them enjoyable. You want your child to associate positive feelings with learning. Take turns choosing activities; give your child some choice sometimes. This makes them feel less dictated to and more willing to learn. Also, offer them some variety in activities, do not always use the same learning methods all of the time as this can create boredom and disinterest. Choose the methods that work best with your child (every child is different) and have fun!

Children are like flowers, they all bloom at different times. But, parents can help nurture them by providing experiences that enable them to blossom into children who love learning and school.

How to Successfully Learn a Foreign Language

Here are some ideas and practical suggestions on how to successfully learn a foreign language.
Some Absolutes:

1. Foreign Language courses are not like other courses you must never procrastinate. Procrastination:failure in foreign language courses. Therefore you must spend a minimum of 15 minutes each day and a minimum of 3 hours a week. And additional time whenever possible. However, you should never spend more than 45 minutes studying the language in one session. Split your study up into several small sessions.
2. Class Attendance is mandatory and necessary in order to pass the course and learn the language.
3. Some occasional review of all material you have learned previously is also very important to your success. (for example, the vocabulary)

Some suggestions to make the different parts of learning a language easier and more successful:

Reading

• Concentrate on reading for comprehension without looking up every unfamiliar word. Look up only those words which cannot even be guessed or determined based on context.
• Read a little bit of the language every day. Especially the chapters in the textbook.

Speaking

• Don’t be afraid of making mistakes, listen carefully to your classmates and SPEAK UP!
• Practice speaking out loud on your own, in a group of friends studying the same language and with your pets such as a dog or cat.

Writing

• Practice writing every day
• Try having a friend dictate some of the language to you while you write it down and then check what you wrote for accuracy.

Some Miscellaneous Helps

1. Develop a Good Attitude, have reasons and goals for studying the language. Know what you plan to learn and how you will get there successfully
2. If you need help get it. Don’t be afraid to ask questions or ask for help for fear of sounding stupid, or being embarrassed.
3. Get audio tapes of the language and listen to them or make you own tapes and listened to yourself in order to perfect your pronunciation.
4. Read out loud.
5. Make flash cards for vocabulary and try using different colors for different genders of the words and for different categories of words such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Practice in study groups, become good friends with some of your classmates and they can help you out.

Using DVD and Video in Your ESL Class

Have you ever wondered how to use video in your ESL classes, without just sitting your students down in front of the screen and hitting ‘Play’? Here are five more activities for you to try.

Vocabulary in context
Choose a scene (no longer than two or three minutes) with some dialog rich in vocabulary. Make a worksheet with ten to twenty words that are used in the scene, or that describe the scene in some way. Give the worksheet to each pair of students and have them discuss some possible contexts in which the vocabulary might appear in a movie. (Giving students the context of the movie as a whole can make this task easier). Play your chosen scene once, asking students to listen for the contexts in which the vocabulary is used. Pairs can then compare their information and report back to you.

Subtitles
A big advantage of DVD over video is the subtitles feature. Playing a scene with subtitles in the students’ own language or in English is good for building confidence. Try playing it with the sound down first, letting them read the subtitles, then with the sound up, again reading the subtitles, and finally with the sound up and the subtitles turned off. Keep the extract you use to about two or three minutes.

News
If you have access to TV news in English, record a news story with plenty of visual footage. Play it with the volume off and have your students discuss in groups what they think the item was about. Then give them a preprepared list of vocabulary, containing words essential for understanding the story. Using this list and what they have seen, students reconstruct the story in pairs and report back to the group. Don’t forget to play it with the volume up at the end, so that students can compare their version with the original.

Cultures
This activity could be used in a conversation class about cultural differences. Find a short extract which shows a typical aspect of British culture, or American culture, or any culture you want to focus on! Have students discuss the differences between what they see and their own culture. Students do not necessarily need to understand the dialog for this — the visual aspect of the cultural scene is usually enough.

Voices in my head
Choose a short scene with some interesting and expressive dialog between two or more characters. Show the scene normally and check students’ comprehension. Put your students into groups, so that you have one group for each character in the scene. Their task is to imagine what is going on inside the head of their assigned character. Play the scene again, several times if necessary, for students to “get to know” their character, and have them work together to imagine his/her thoughts. Finally, play the scene once more, hitting “Pause” after each character has spoken, at which point the groups say what their character is thinking.

A short video sequence with a clearly focused activity is an effective and motivating way to bring variety to your ESL classes. Your students will go away with more than if you sit them down in front of the screen and hit ‘play’.