Why Visually Stimulating Material Helps Kids Learn English Better

Teaching primary kids English, is becoming easier with the advent of classroom technology. It wasn’t long ago that a grade 3 teacher had to purchase non-customizable task cards to re-use class after class, or try and painstakingly create her own task cards, with limited design skills, Microsoft Word and the school printer, then cut out!

By introducing meaningful visual elements to the curriculum, educators can help students with information retention and being truly engaged. In school, a child receives a multitude of visual messages daily, so teachers are essentially competing with the kid’s attention span. By turning learning into a game with fun school clip art and custom task cards, the child has a better chance of performing and studies have also shown that children who are taught with visuals, get better grades and report cards.

ESL Game: Alphabet Puzzle

English teachers working with kids, especially with those who learn English as second language, have to face one of the biggest challenges a teacher has to deal with. The challenge is keeping young learners entertained while learning the language. Although little kids' brains are brilliant in memorizing things and absorbing a new language, it's extremely hard to make children learn something when they are bored. Their attention span is to short to focus on something boring. The traditional English teaching approaches used for adult learners do not work for preschoolers and elementary school student, let along toddlers whose moms want them to learn English as early as possible. Teach children like adults and you'll see them fidgeting and yawning throughout the entire lesson with almost no success in learning the language. So that's why ESL teachers have to resort to using fun activities, games, songs, colorful pictures and cartoons to grab kids' attention and create that atmosphere of fun and excitement where children's brains get ready to memorize letters, vocabulary and phonetics with and astonishing ease.

BUY ALL ALPHABET PUZZLE CARDS IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY PDF FILE

Unfortunately, all those games, flashcards, worksheets, songs and movies require a great deal of time, efforts and money for teachers to get or create them. I thought I'd create some teaching materials including printable worksheets and games to spare ESL teachers' time a little bit and let them take care of their personal needs besides getting occupied with their professional stuff.

Printable English alphabet puzzle game

Forest Animals Worksheets

A lot of teachers need worksheets to make their work easier and lessons more interesting. However, not many educators have time and abilities to create worksheets by their own. So they are often looking for printable teaching materials online. I am lucky to have learned how to use graphic editing software to make all kinds of worksheets for my teaching purposes. I totally understand the problem of thousands of teachers around the world who experience shortage of visuals as they are too busy to dedicate their time for designing good-looking printables. That is why I decided to share worksheets, flashcards and coloring pages I had created to teach English to kids at the kindergarten where I work here in Ukraine. So I hope that teachers, educators and parents from around the globe will find my materials useful. You can find all posts containing free printables in this blog following this link.

Watch the Forest Animals video on Youtube

Here are worksheets which go with my recently announced Forest Animals song:

Forest animals matching letters and pictures worksheet

Forest animals matching words and pictures worksheet

Rain Song for Kids

Autumn (Fall) is always considered to be a rainy season. Many people associate rain with a gloomy, sad weather when nobody has a desire to go outside. In my song I disagree with this opinion. The boy who is singing the song (as seen in the video below) personifies all children’s spontaneity and confidence in the future. He is happy in spite of any bad weather and any such troubles. That’s why teaching children and working close with them is an exciting and inspiring profession.

I wrote this rain song in one of such gloomy autumn days but I think it can be used also in spring and summer to learn the weather vocabulary.

I Am not Afraid of Rain
(Song Lyrics)

Watch the Rain Song video on Youtube

I am not afraid of rain,
‘Cause I have a big umbrella.
Outside the whole day
I will play in any weather.
In the rain I’m gonna walk
Let people say at home it’s better,
I will listen to the raindrops talk
Petter-patter, Petter-patter, Petter-patter.

Rain song lyrics

As always, I would like to suggest  you a few worksheets to practice rainy weather vocabulary with your own children as well as students.

Worksheet 1: In this task children should match the rain vocabulary with the corresponding pictures in order to remember words on the tipic.

Rainy Weather Vocabulary Worksheet

About This Blog

Hi, there!

My name’s Olha. I’m an English teacher from Ukraine. I’ve been working with little kids for over 20 years and I really enjoy it. Children are very curious and sincere, and the process of teaching and communication with them is so rewarding. There are no words to describe the feelings which you experience when working with a kid for some time and then you observe the result, and comprehension, and happiness. It’s just great!

But this joy has nothing in common with the fantastic delight of bringing up your own child!!! The miracle you’re holding in your arms relies on you. His future life completely depends on the moral values and knowledge you’ll give him. You ought to help your child to bring out the best. That’s why we started to develop both mental skills and emotional intelligence in our son to give him the opportunity to fulfill himself in life. One of our goals is also to provide him with creative learning. Every day we try to do something new to expand the horizons of imagination and to develop our son’s creativity by means of arts and crafts.

English is an important part of our life, too. Although it's not our native language, but we try to speak English in our everyday situations as much as possible. I strongly believe you should teach your kids English from the early childhood so that they could communicate in English like native speakers.

I would like to share my feelings and ideas with you. In my blog you can find a lot of my worksheets for teaching ABC, phonics and vocabulary, craft ideas and lessons. You can use them for a single child or in a group. Also I’m a big fan of learning through songs and movement activities, so you can listen to my songs and watch videos.