[musica]

It sounds like you are good at making up songs so I am going to share something I have done with young children that they love.

Its music and movement involving you modelling movement so the child will join in with you as you sing the appropriate song. For instance, say you choose to be a dog, you get down and begin crawling around the room as you sing ,
'woof, woof, woof
woof, woof, woof,
I'm a little puppy dog,
woof, woof, woof,
running round my garden,
having lots of fun
running round my garden,
having lots of fun
'woof, woof, woof
woof, woof, woof,
I'm a little puppy dog,
woof, woof, woof,

Then you could mime digging up a bone singing
Dig, dig, dig etc,
then pretend to eat the bone, singing
crunch, crunch, crunch etc

This song can be adapted to a cat etc.

Another song I sing is for butterflies as I move around the room flapping amy arms and pretending to be a butterfly.

Flutter little butterfly
Flying all around
Flutter little butterfly
Flying all around.
Flying high, flying low (fly up high, then down low)
Flying everywhere you go
Flutter little butterfly
Flying all around

You can make it more fun by pretending to stop and sit on an imaginary flower, ask what colour their flower is, this is funny.
Then take off again for a new flight, ha ha.

Change things up as much as your creativity allows, bzz,bzz, bzz, I'm a little bumble bee etc.

Hope I don't sound too crazy, kids really love this type of activity and soon you can ask them to choose which animals to be, elephants walking with straight legs and arms, snakes sliding along the floor. Lots of vocabulary, fast, slow, high, low, big, small etc. Get them to do an action and have the others guess what they are being!

[little sage]

Hi Zashi,

It sounds like you're having a great class. What you said about the mother wanting the little ones to Speak Speak Speak reminded me of one mother of a student I had who wanted the same thing. Her 5 year old was super shy so getting her to speak was quite a task. It's good to remember, like other people here have said, that that kids should be speaking at their pace, not their mother's.

I don't know if you want to pick a course book, but I enjoyed using the Supertots book with this quiet youngster. It's full of bright coloured pictures that are simple enough to talk about and has reward stickers that she can add onto the pages herself. The workbook has lots of puzzles, games and colouring activities that the two of you can do together. The songs that match the book are also short and catchy with a lot of TPR, which means she can repeat the wordss if she wants to/ can, but if not she can do the actions and you know she's still absorbing the English.

One idea I got from the book was to use puppets. I used the photocopied characters from their book stuck to chopsticks, but any puppet or doll is great to bring to class. Bring one for you and one for her and then "let" the dolls have a conversation. It's a fun way to play in English.