Preschool EFL

My maternal nature mixed probably with my obsession with having kids before I hit the big 3-0, has lead me to teaching English to preschoolers in Italy. It's just something I do privately in my spare time at the moment while I study but hopefully as of January I will be contracted for an hour a week in a local nursery.

My first foray into the world of preschool teaching was Lucia - my first Italian student. She was only 4 years old when I started teaching her but she was a long way from starting school yet since they don't usually start until they're 6 in Italy. This meant I had at least two years of lessons to fill where she would not be able to either read or write. If you try looking for TEFL lesson plans, courses, books or other materials on line for nursery pupils you'll quickly find yourself in front of a brick wall called 'WRITING AND READING'. Now I don't know about you but I would presume that if an exercise is supposedly 'suitable for preschool learners' that it wouldn't include anything that a preschooler couldn't do.

Add to this lack of usable material the fact that you've only had one pupil - there's a limit to the number of entertaining games you can do with just one child - and you've got a bit of a problem.

So I started researching. I searched through hundreds of websites and book reviews and in the end I bought lifetime membership to langacademy.net so that I could download the books and scan through them myself. And then I started patch working the pieces together to make some kind of course. The most useful book I've found so far is Kid's Box 1 (Cambridge publications). Lucia could handle most of the exercises up to unit 8. After that there are a lot more writing exercises. Then we also used some songs from the BBC Learning English website. We've played Memory, Simon Says, Where is, Boardgames and The Magic Box so many times that I've lost count. But she hasn't got board yet.

Lucia now knows all the colours, the number up to 20, toys, school objects, commands, prepositions of place, family members, many adjectives, clothes, animals, food and drink and parts of the body. She still can't read or write anything in English but I'm hoping to start teaching her after the Christmas. She's half way through Primary one now after all.

But she can hear differences between English and Italian sounds that even some of my more advanced students have difficulty with. She told me the other day that she accidentally said 'blue' instead of 'blu' to her friend in class the other day. It's a very subtle difference but she notices it. She can also pronounce the 'th' sound in 'teeth' and 'mouth'.

What I'm trying to say is what started out as a problem has ended up giving me a huge amount of satisfaction...