Tomorrow is the big day. First day back with some new groups and some continuing from last year.
I will need to apply different strategies with different groups.
The first group is a group of 10 year olds in their third year of English at my school. They are half way through their coursebook. (Sky 1, Longman) As with most coursebooks, it is a bit dry so I am going to have to do something to liven it up whilst including all the content. One of the objectives with this group is to get them to A1 level and enroll them for the Cambridge Young Learners Movers exam in June. Glancing at the coursebook, only the present tenses are covered so I will need to work on the Past Simple to get them through Movers.
The second group is a class I had last year of young children, aged 6 and 7. We did lots of work on phonics last year to prepare them for reading in English, since most of them were just learning to read in Spanish and a couple of them will just be starting reading this year in school. They learnt most of the sounds and some of them could blend quite well, reading short words. I will continue to implement this this year, introducing tricky words, as I think it gives them an advantage for when they have to deal with the written word in English. I will include a separate entry on the teaching of phonics in this blog. This year this group of children will be using a coursebook which involves reading and writing.
As for the final group that begin tomorrow, I am still not sure exactly who they are! They are supposedly a teenage FCE group that I will be preparing to sit the exam in 2011. I have decided to try and use some technology with them, which I will also explain in a seperate entry.
Tomorrow I will write down my impressions after meeting my new learners and then I cans start to plan more in detail what I would like to do with them all!
