Elementary School Teaching: General Tips

Maria Filippone

Lessons seem to work best when you block class time. Three activities instead of one will tend to: keep the students attention and re-enforce the vocabulary you are trying to teach utilizing a few different approaches toward learning it.

Make your life and your teachers' lives easier. Once you know about your own situation and how often you will be in a specific school I recommend you make a list of the content you want to teach and the grade level you feel it would be appropriate for. This acts as a skeleton toward a curriculum which can sometimes be overly rigid, especially as you figure out how kids at different schools and in different classes learn. Basically I am at each of my schools once a week. I compile about twelve to fifteen potential content points per grade I think are important. Some overlap like body parts or emotions or numbers. Others are specific to the grade level. More vocabulary oriented content for first and second graders, i.e. fruits, animals, occupations and more dialogue oriented content for fifth and sixth graders: I can..., Who is this?, How do you say _ in English?, with third and fourth grade being a good transition time between learning words and learning how to use them to express full sentences and thoughts. As for the content that overlaps I make more specific note of what objectives I have with that content at varying levels. For instance, you will probably teach numbers throughout all elementary levels. With first grade you want to solidify they know one through ten and work your way up into the teens, with third grade you may want to teach how to tell time and respond to someone asking for the time, there you focus on number through sixty, with sixth graders you can get into the finer points of discussing what the date is, they'll review numbers and then you can move on to first, second, third,... in order to teach how to verbalize dates and how to verbalize placement in a line or in a race, etc.

Which brings me to the necessity for reinforcement: building on shared content is great. The kids feel like they already have an in to a lesson. There is also tons to be said about having a five minute or so beginning of class ritual of sorts. With the kindergarten through second or third grade set I tend to do a series of stretches. We practice positional words: up, down, left, right,... and some verbs: jump, hop, turn,... with the younger kids I lead, with the older ones I say and they do or we play Simon says. With the older kids, fourth through sixth grade, we focus more on phonics lessons. At that point they know the basic alphabet single letter sounds so we make it a point to learn reoccurring syllabic sounds. If I can tie it into the lesson content for the day it's a plus and a way to bring up the phonics later on in the class when the content is being taught.

In general the classes have to be active. Reliance for instruction should be placed on very active and illustrative directions instead of on the homeroom teacher's translation skills or your own Japanese language ability. Going back to that skeletal content outline, I fax a copy of that to all my schools so they have an idea of what I think I will be teaching. It doesn't limit your control over how you teach the content, but if you can fax a content list with Japanese objective purpose and translations for the content points (thank you JTEs) you'll make your elementary school teachers more at ease with you and what you spring on them due to the nature of most elementary school ALTs running around to various schools (I have twelve schools total).