Kids' Understanding Comes through Hands, Eyes and Ears

Kids have special ways in order to learn English. Their characteristics are didifferent from adults. One of them is their understanding comes through hands, eyes and ears. In my former note I suggested to use multi-sence method.
Here is an example; Our objective is to identfy the colors red, yellow and blue. Many teachers teach this objective by translating them into Indonesian or they may write the translation on a white board and ask to copy. It seems simple and they may thing three colors is not enough so that they teach more colors in a period or a meeting. To know how the kids master the objective, the teachers often ask in Bahasa Indonesia "Bahasa Inggrisnya merah apa anak-anak?" Finally, they judge that the students' competence is achieved if the students can answer the questions.
As matter of fact the illustration above is misunderstood. The kids may have many vocabularies of colors, but lack of using them. It means they know much about English because they can translate, but they do not know how to do. The question is how we should do. The following will explain the steps we teach the objectives;
1. Say the three colors by showing the things that have the colors. When we say red color, we show red color, we say blue color we show blue color, ect. Say, "It's yellow," or just "Yellow"
2. Have them repeat after us enough times so that they are familiar.
3. After that, we can vary by introducing the question, "What color?" to give the context. Here we do not need to translate the question because the context is clear enough. The kids will understand automatically.
4. Prepare some pictures and distribute one picture for one student. Have them colored. While they are busy doing their project, we can go around and ask everyone about what color the pictures are. By doing this we will see which students marked mastery, in progress or not mastery.
5. To those who have mastery or in progress may be invited to share with the class just by saying the colors of their pictures. Or, they can put their pictures on a display board and ask the other students to see, and if possible have them ask their friends' pictures by using the question what color?
6. End the activity by singing a song or a game about the colors. We can create our own song or game to make the learning activity more meaningful.

As you see from the first to the last activity that the learning involves almost all the students' senses. Despite the objective is simple, the activity is meaningful. It means we stress more on how to teach than the material itself.

Teaching English for Kids

The first time when I taught English for my elementary students I felt confused. Idid not know much how to teach. At that time English materials was around how to master grammatical structers. No wonder not only my students but also I loooked bored. It was my bad experience.
Teaching English for kids is not difficult if we know the way which we come into . In this case, we have to know the art how to teach them. The folowing description will open your mind how to treat them;
1. Take listening and speaking among the four language skills, especially for lower grades. The baby starts learing mother tongue language through listening then speaking. But if we theach the kids reading or even writing mean we teach unnaturally. Do not care whether your kids can not read or write the words or phrases they are going to learn. Do not write anythings and then ask them to read. You just focus on listening and speaking.
2. Use multisense methods in your teaching. The kids should watch, listen, touch even act in order to master the topic so that the learning process will be meaningful. The meaningful experience stays longer in our mind.

3. Grade your materials from the most simple to the complexed ones. to grade means we should not hurry to give all the materials, but step by step. Take an example when we want to teach number 1 to 10, give them 1 to 3 first. Make it sure they know how to say and to use the numerical symbols 1, 2 and 3 in their learning activities such as to say jumbled numbers and even to count. Avoid having numbers memorized.
4. Focus more on the way you diliver the material than the content of the material itself. Do not judge the topic only from the content. Kids often think differently from adults.Uninteresting topics for us would be interesting for the kids.
5. Use songs to enrich their vocabularies or patterns they are going to learn instead of memorising. Almost all kids like song. Many teachers give song as a reward because the students have done many exercises. Use song as one of your teaching activity form the opening to the end of meeting.