NET’S
-
What’s
It All About, Alfie? -
Who’s
Who? -
-
Harry
Hat Man In Letterland. Fancy
A Coffee In Dave’s Café
In this
issue:-
-
What’s What?
So what is this new venture all about?
Well, as a fellow volunteer, I just thought
it might be of help if we were more in touch so that we could offer support,
help and advice to each other.
I am very open to suggestions as to what
you would like included in the Newsletter, but for
starters, I have divided it into four sections:
1. General News of what is going on in SPC.
.
2. A feature on a particular volunteer and their center.
3. Teaching material you might like to use, or
highlighting particular resources.
4. An article related to teaching ESL to
pre-schoolers.
FELLOW
VOLUNTEERS
These are the people
who have made contact so far. I have included the telephone number of their
center in case you ever wanted to contact them.
Angie - Monday
afternoons - BOC Day Nursery ,
Olivia - Sze Wu Shu Min Day Nursery , Tseung Kwan
O - (2178 3819)
Hazel - Thursday mornings -
Ma Tau Chung Day Nursery,
Dickson -
Saturday afternoons - also Ma Tau
Chung.
Laura - Jockey Club Hok
Sam Day Nursery, Tai Wai -
(26057360)
Dave -
Thursdays - Tai Wai, and
Lam Woo Day Nursery, Tai
Teaching
Packages
You probably know that Cherie is
teaching phonics in 9 different centers. Together we are producing teaching
packages for each of the phonemes. So far we have finished the letters a, b, p,
c, k, d and s. I believe that Miss So will now circulate these to each center
(remember there are 19 altogether) and ask that they be photocopied and put
into a file so that present and future volunteers and center teachers can draw
upon them.
Specifically for each phoneme, the
packages contain:
1. Introductory pictures.
2. A list of common words
associated with that sound. These have been enlarged, laminated and made into
flashcards.
3. A set of pictures which
have also been made into flashcards.
4. Writing worksheets.
5. Phonics practices.
6.
7. Songs and nursery
rhymes.
8. Tongue twisters.
9. Games, Fun-, and Art
& Craft activities
10.
Computer
activities.
The emphasis is on learning
through play and doing activities which are fun.
There is probably enough material
in each package to last you 10 weeks at least. So the idea is not to plough
through it, but to dip into them then keep going back to them at intervals as
revision.
Volunteering
Information
My name is Norman Mitchell. I
was born in
business, a bookshop which published
books for the legal Industry.
After being in HK for a while, I
was spending all my days at home doing nothing.
One day while reading the HK
magazine I came across an advertisement for volunteers for the SPC and decided
I would like to help and subsequently joined the organization. I have been a
volunteer at the
children are eager to learn and will sit
down and behave themselves (with one or two exceptions) and with the help of
the teachers there we can achieve a lot. The children are always eager to see
me and give me hugs or ‘high 5’s’ whenever I see them. Although they mostly speak
to me in Cantonese and so I have no idea what they are saying, I can sometimes
guess and besides the teachers there are always helpful. It’s a good way to
learn Cantonese!
I think the Teaching packages
will be a great help for all volunteers and centers so as to standardize
English within the centers and provide consistency in learning the same
materials everywhere.
ARTICLES
In this section I shall try to
include articles, taken from the web or magazines that might be of
interest/help to you. This first one is from an excellent ESL website www.daveseslcafe.com (not mine!).
On there is a Discussion Forum
for teachers asking for help and advice. This particular one, from the
Elementary section, is in reply to ‘Help – 5 year olds – advice needed.’
Ideally, you should be assisted by their
head teacher. Kindergarten classes are a whole lot different from ‘real’ school
– kids here learn how to learn, and many activities are geared to develop their
various skills, including fine motor skills. So, you cannot simply ‘teach’ and
watch as they acquire ‘knowledge’. Much of what you are teaching you has to
demonstrate, and discipline and obedience are prerequisites that an assistant
can better maintain than you.
I teach in Chinese kindergartens, and I
manage my class in English entirely, although I might make a concession to
Chinese once in a while. What’s important is that you must establish a routine
from the outset, so kids know what is going to happen. There should be the
greeting ritual with the pupils standing up and formally welcoming you to their
classroom. Next, I suggest a well-structured teaching plan. Try to think 3-6
months ahead, and where your learners should be by that time; how are you going
to teach the necessary expressions and vocabulary? I assure you can do it
without translation – provided that you do not overestimate your kids’
brainpower.
The translation approach presupposes that
the kid ‘knows’ the concept and the word(s) in his first language; this is not
always the case. Kids may ‘know’ adult words such as ‘coffee’ or ‘go shopping’,
but in the kids’ own lives, these concepts have not arrived yet. Thus, these
kids might ‘know’ that coffee is a kind of funny black drink that some adults drink;
translating is easy – but understanding????? Understanding comes from
experience, and that means you should put yourself in the kids’ shoes.
You need to help them explore the physical
world themselves and experience whatever they can experience. Physical
activities are very helpful – doing exercises (naming body parts involved in
the exercises), for example. I staged running, jumping and other races – and
both the activity, as such, as well as the competitive nature
of the event were highly motivating for my kids.
Drawing is another way of
learning to conceptualize the world in a new medium. They love drawing and
writing, and this stimulates their imagination. You can draw animals, objects,
people, letters and numbers.
Don’t forget your kids are still
learning their first tongue too. That’s why it is not the best idea to use a
bilingual approach. They are still learning how to come to grips with such
abstract notions as ‘I, you, he, she, we, you, they’, the plural and singular,
and tenses.
As a rough indication, let’s say
you need to teach them a few hundred words (no more than 500), but don’t
forget, these come in different shapes, thus the actual number they have to
handle is several times this number. Add to this some grammar and syntax
elements:
-
tenses
-
singular/plural
-
SVA
( I, you, we, they have/give/do versus he, she, it has/gives/does)
The usual topics to cover are:-
-
I
and my body
-
Numbers
-
The
notion of Time – weekdays, birthdays, yesterdays, tomorrow, months
-
Colors
-
Home
and Family; household appliances
-
Animals
Finally, don’t forget:
-
-
Songs
-
Computer
activities.