Word Cloud: A Taste of the Moon

This word cloud is based on the whole text of the story "A Taste of the Moon", by Michael Grejniec.

Word clouds are really fun and very nice to look at! 

Let's prepare an attractive activity, starting from the word cloud, done with Wordle...

- At first, we tell the story, to help children learn about the plot and the main vocabulary. 

Some days later, it is time to work with the word cloud and see whether the kids are able to remember what the text was about and some of the main words.

The activity with the word cloud consists of several tasks, with the aim to enhance interest and motivation in the reading and writing process.

Tasks:

- Guess the story, highlighting the key words.

- Memorize new vocabulary, providing cards with the printed words on them.
- Create a word wall, where we can stick our favorite or meaningful words, coming up from the word cloud. The purpose of the word wall is to enhance both reading and writing skills. We will encourage children to copy these words for the word wall.
-  Explain the story again all together, looking at the main words from the word cloud.
- Finally, we can play with the word cloud, searching the longest and the shortest word, counting the words referred to animals, and those referred to actions to reach the moon.

Dvolver Moviemaker: Welcome aboard

Dvolver Moviemaker is a very user-friendly tool that enables you to create short animations with dialogue bubbles in a few minutes. It is fun and innovative.

We can use this animation about greetings and self-introductions dialogue to introduce this topic and to contextualize learning. It will enhance our children’s motivation!

The main purpose of the activity is to learn greeting and self-introduction expressions.

Taking the animation “Welcome aboard” as a starting point to motivate children, we teach them to introduce themselves and to greet their classmates.

Then, we can play a funny group activity to practice greetings:

“Pass the ball”:
The children, standing in a circle, pass the ball and greet each other. We greet the first child and pass him/her the ball waiting for the proper response. Then, the child passes the ball to the next child and the greeting continues. When the ball returns to the first child, the greeting has ended.

 

How's the Weather?

The aim of this activity is to learn weather vocabulary and to create a rutine, beginning our classes with the question: What's the weather today?
It could be very interesting to make all together a "Weather clock" and the children could look outside every day and record each day's weather.




Let's prepare some flashcards, representing cloudy, sunny, partly cloudy, rain, snow, storm, windy and winter sun, to say then a Weather rhyme, doing the actions and showing the flashcards. 
We can stick the flashcards on the wall, in our Weather corner.

 

Weather rhyme, by Vanessa Reilly and Sheila M. Ward:

It's snowing, it's snowing
brr, brr, brr,
It's raining, it's raining
pit-a-pat, pat,
It's sunny, it's sunny,
phew! phew!
It's windy, it's windy,
whoosh! whoosh!

Songs are a great help to enhance language development. So, I would suggest practicing with the song: The Sun Comes Up!.
We can sing this weather song all together, doing the mime.

And to end up, we ask the children to look at the pictures on the left, with the different weather. Now they have to draw lines from each picture on the left with the drawing on the right. 

Counting numbers with rhymes

Rhymes are a very fun way to learn vocabulary, besides it can help to work rutines. Children love rhymes and they can learn rutines and skills.
Let's learn this fragment of the rhyme "One, Two, Buckle my Shoe". Children will learn to count numbers.

One, two, tie my shoe.

Three, four, shut the door.

Five, six, pick up sticks.

Seven, eight, stand up straight.

Nine, ten, count again!

At first, we say the rhyme doing all the actions described in it, and encouraging the children to join in.

Then, together with the children, we say the rhyme and act it out.

Now, let's sing a fun numbers song called "Ten Little Numbers", to count from 1 to 10 with a very catchy tune.

With the game "How many apples", we can learn to count from one to ten and to ask using the question phrase "How many" to response with numbers.  Click on the link below:

http://www.eslgamesplus.com/videos/numbers-how-many-apples-esl-video/

Teaching the Alphabet

Learning the English alphabet is something than can seem difficult for young learners, and this is because some letters are pronounced differently. It is important to work with letters that are pronounced always in the same way.
Using pictures can be a good help to learn the letters and to get familiar to them. 
We can print the alphabet and have it hung on the wall.
Click on image below to download picture cards for the alphabet.

 

Songs are a good source to enhance motivation in preschool children. 

I love this two songs, they are very pleasant and will help children to memorise the sounds while enjoying music.

 

 

We can provide lots of activities to work the alphabet. I would suggest three simple and fun activities recommended for young learners:

WRITING CHILDREN'S NAMES:

Children love to work with their names. Let's write their names with the English alphabet.

DRAWING THE LETTERS ON A SMALL CHALKBOARD:

We give one small chalkboard to each student. We say out loud a letter and they have to draw it.

I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE...:

We say "I spy with my little eye something beginning with T". The children have to guess the object, for example, the table.