Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Lupu Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Yancheng Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
Games play a very important role in the classroom when it comes to teaching young learners. Due to the specifics of the age development, children (especially younger ones) have shorter attention span rather adults. And because of that they are very easy to get distracted, bored or get unfocused in some other ways. So one of the main things for the teacher to bear in mind while working with kids is to be active and conduct lessons in a fun and dynamic way. And games ideally fit such purpose. And luckily, there are a vast variety of games that can be played in the classroom. Basically, any activity with certain rules and an element of entertainment could be called a game. Even some popular games that were not initially designed for educational purposes can be adapted too. It's a very nice thing to start your lesson with and warm up the students in order to get their attention and have them ready for the further classroom activities as well as it's perfectly good to play games for the Activate part of the lesson to practice the language point from the Study part and to ensure the students got it well. But before choosing games for our lesson it's very important to think about the main points of the lesson first and how the games can be related to it. Because if they cannot, then there is just simply no point in playing them, since games in the classroom, as it was written here before, are designed to facilitate the better understanding of the lesson points that are being taught. There are, however, some other details that we have to pay attention to when planning games for our lesson – is the game easy to play and the rules are easy enough for the children to understand; how is the game going to be organized (will that be a board game, table game, contest etc.); what materials can we need for playing that; how many participants would that activity require; what set of a classroom would be the most appropriate. It’s essential to think about all these things ahead and try to foresee some potential problems, because we can face some very unpleasant surprises if try to arrange games spontaneously on the spot. Another crucial factor that would define the type of games for us is the age of the young learners. There is no surprise that the games that are appropriate for younger kids are not going to work well with older ones and vice versa. It’s all again caused by the difference in the age development between younger and older children. As we know, the younger our kids are, the shorter their attention span is and the more they tend to be active. So the best option for working with kids like this is to pick very short, simple and dynamic kinds of games. That would help us achieve the better effect. While having the older children (from the age of nine to thirteen) would require choosing more complex games that are not always as active as for the young kids, but have more advanced rules and a little bit more tricky. And also we have to keep in mind that kids are kids – they can get very emotional and nosy in the process of playing, which is good – it means they are all focused, but the teacher should always know how to maintain the discipline in the classroom in appropriate ways. So, in the conclusion, we can see that games are very nice in terms of children education. Playing them is a great way of learning and remembering new language. However, it takes certain knowledge from teachers to choose and arrange them in the right way, but if it’s done so, that is probably the best way to achieve a higher efficiency and quality of the lesson.
