Don't know how to make my lessons fun and interesting Hey folks! I'm quite new with teaching, have only got 3 months experience. I am teaching in Beijing and never had any training. I'm teaching full-time in a kindergarten and recently took another part-time job in a training center.
I'm not doing well in the training center where I'm teaching kids between 3-11. Problem for me is that there are no lesson plans or anything to give some ideas. Especially teaching the kids between 3-6 is very hard as the material is pretty terrible and illogical (all the teachers think so). I have to teach these small kids sentences, but some pretty hard ones like "What a big box!" - "Guess what's in it?". This is what I mean by illogical. In the kindergarten the material is better and I teach things link "I like/I don't like..." and so on. Also, there is no phonics practicing or anything in the training center. Anyways, I have to teach this material, but I don't know how to handle teaching sentences. I don't find it so hard to teach words as it is pretty easy to play some fun games with flashcards and it is more tangible for such young kids. But when it comes to teaching these sentences I don't really know what to do which results in my lessons being pretty boring for these small kids. It just ends up in a lot of repeating, rewarding them when they can say a whole sentences like letting them throw a ball in a basket or something like that. I also let them perform the dialogs with puppets, that's as good as it gets. I haven't got that "creative mind" that you are supposed to have as a teacher and as mentioned I've never received any training, so my foundation is pretty bad. Therfore I could really use some advices, ideas, tools, games or whatever for this. Would be highly appreciated! I just really want to have that rewarding experience of super happy kids that don't want to leave the classroom when the lesson finishes, instead of feeling it was boring and uninteresting.
Also I would like to get some ideas on how to teacher the older kids between 8-11? Here they have a student's book and a workbook so we can do exercises. But also I find this pretty boring as the material is not the most interesting either and some of the things in the curriculum are pretty strange to be honest. For example last lesson I taught the 4th graders how to use "I didn't" and "I did". We do some sentence scrambling and they come up to the whiteboard and write a correct sentence and earns a sticker, but in the long run it's pretty boring. How should I approach this? |