[nimsie]

Hi!!
Ive just got a new class with only 2 5 year old boys, and although Im having great fun with them Im already struggling for activities, topics, games etc...
They dont have a book, so its up to me to think up topics and ideas...any help anyone can give me would be great!!
thanks

[mesmark]

What have you been doing with them so far? What kind of environment are you teaching them?

Did you take a look at the post just below this?
Teaching children aged 4-6

[nimsie]

I work in a small school. This is the smallest and youngest class, and we have no resources for such young children because we havent had them before.
I have done general numbers, colours, animals, alphabet with them. But am finding it hard to think of ways to keep activities interesting with only 2 of them at such a low level!

[mesmark]

Well, for games and resources you can try the games here:
Free ESL games, printable communication games, free english games, grammar games, printable games for the classroom

There are plenty of pair games and here is a list of general games and activities that work well with kids
games to play from MES English

And here is a bit of a curriculum for some other ideas on content and target language
the Speaking First Curriculum

[Pix]

Hello there,

I can suggest that you take a look at my plays and skits page. You'll see young kids in action in the photos there and you can tell how much they are loving it. There is a group of children in the pictures but all the skits and plays that I wrote may be used with any number of children from one to one up to fifteen max.

You prepare the boys first by teaching the main vocab in the skit using games. Introduce it with listening games, practise with speaking games. Next you practise the vocab in a question or sentence taken from the text in the role-play, again using games.

To get concrete examples of how to do that then by all means sign up to receive the free games that I give out from my site which have a lot of detail on how to take a particular game idea and adapt it to teach different kinds of language.

Once the boys know the key vocabulary from memory and have more or less grasped the key sentence/s you can start to put the play together. So at no time do you give out a script and have them reading off their parts - that just leads to mumbling and it suddenly makes it boring for the children. Whereas doing it from memory forces them to engage.

Hopefully those boys still like songs - because often older boys go off them thinking that they are sissy. So if they do like songs then I recommend using a lot of those and make up actions to them or ask the boys what actions they can think of.

Here is where you can get one of my skits free and read a bit more about using them:
lesson plan and free skit for teaching the present perfect, but you can use the simple past instead if you prefer.

And this is my book of ESL Role-Plays and Skits for Children.

Kind regards
Shelley