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Elementary Kids'
Class |
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Goals |
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I want the children to be active in
their own learning so I teach in a
child-centered way. This means that
the children are the focus of the
learning process, not the teacher or
the book. |
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We
want your children to learn to
communicate! At Rainbow English, the
children actively find themselves
getting up and speaking out loud in
front of others to play a game or do
a skit. |
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We
teach them mistakes are a natural
part of learning and communicating
and if you make a |
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mistake your are learning. This
means there is a confident
atmosphere in our classes and so the
children can make the language their
own and take it with them after the
lesson! It is not passively given to
them by the teacher. “I know that
language, I learned it by myself and
so it's mine!” |
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There is no need for a long period
of silence. Kids who study with us
can speak from the start if they
want to. |
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I want your kids to be able to have
a conversation but also to read and
write. This will be a very big help
when they go to Junior High School
and reduce stress at that time for
them. We use use a balanced approach
of “the four skills” : listening,
speaking, reading and writing. If
your kids can read they can develop
by themselves. Wouldn't you feel
really good one day if you saw your
child reading a Harry Potter novel
in English by themselves? |
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We teach systematically: kids' love
to match patterns and we encourage
this by teaching the individual
letters, then pairs of letters which
lead to short words. They learn to
read and write sentence patterns
which eventually lead to dialogues,
paragraphs and then stories. |
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We
teach reading and spelling using
phonics and also the whole
word approach or the Look and
Say Method. Phonics uses the
real sound of the letter to build up
a word but, because kids can
recognize patterns and letter/word
shapes very well, we use the whole
word approach too. There are also
many non-phonetic words in English,
e.g. were, who, you that
can't readily be taught phonically. |
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Learning “the four skills” together
means that they will internalize
what they learn deeply. Practice is
the mother of skill! |
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How do we achieve these
goals? |
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For
kids, it's better to have a
classroom in which learning is more
important than forcing immediate
results. I think that a well defined
outcome for the course as a whole is
essential but it is also very
important to allow the children to
go at the pace that suits the class
as a whole. I like to let the
children explore and make their own
model of how English works. Children
will naturally choose what interests
them most and they will avoid those
things that don't work well for
them. |
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However, a bit of
mental effort means that whatever we learn is
learned deeply. If your mind has to change a way
of thinking about something a deeper learning
occurs than if we learn by rote. We provide a
context for the kids to communicate by giving
them a communication problem. If we create a
need for them to communicate they will learn
the language because kids, actually, are natural
problem solvers. If we support and stimulate
them with interesting problems using good
material the children will figure out the
answers by themselves. The key is giving just
enough assistance. |
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Not heads-down |
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Classes at Rainbow English are the
opposite of,
“OK,
class! Repeat after me... Good. Open
the book to page 7. Do this page and
only this page. Heads down. No
talking. Let's do it! OK, stop!”
You
will never hear that in our classes!
Only listening to the teacher and
having a heads-down lesson will not
help your kids when they go to
Junior High School. |
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Active, not passive |
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It is
safe to say that there little
learning where there is little
positive emotional involvement. For
kids, this means that they learn
more where there are positive
emotions and choice. Who wants to be
stuck in a place where you have no
control or choice over what you are
doing and for which you do not
particularly care? The children I
teach at Rainbow English love
to come because they can decide
some of the objectives of the lesson.
They know they are at the center of
a carefully planned lesson. In that
lesson there will be fun challenges
for them to learn and actively
use their minds. Rather than, “What
will teacher teach us today?”
the children ask, “I wonder what
puzzle we can solve today?” |
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Powerful motivation
comes from inside |
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I
believe the rewards for learning
should be feeling good about what
you have learned, feeling good about
yourself and feeling good about
solving your own problems.
Motivation to learn anything should
come from inside the person and not
from outside. If you rely on
something outside yourself for all
your motivation what happens when
that thing eventually goes away? I
want to train kids to be able to
meet a challenge and overcome it and
not to be dependent on someone else
to solve it for them. The world
needs people who can address serious
challenges more than ever. We would
do well to remember that a challenge
(or a problem) is a chance to learn
something of use to us in our lives. |
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