V. Listening, Oral Work, Reading, and Writing

V. Listening, Oral Work, Reading, and Writing

The group will submit only one entry for these tasks.

• What are your challenges when teaching the listening, speaking, reading, writing skills? In what ways can the ideas presented in chapters 3 through 6 help you to teach the four skills better?

We were discussing about which one of the three skills was the most difficult to teach. We think the writing skill is the most difficult because children were always asking why words in english are written in that way, but their pronunciation is pretty different. The average of the ages of our students was between 4 to 6 six years old, so writing was the skills less used in our classes.

They loved to repeat every single word and phrase that we pronounced, also they loved to sing. Children at that age are like little sponges because they absorb everything they hear and see.

• Which of activities featured on chapters 3 through 6 did you try in your classes? Did they work? Explain why they did or didn’t work. Did you make any changes to the activities?

Explain which changes you made, and how they affected the way you ran the activity.

We did almost the same activities in our classes, but in some cases we had to change the rules and procedure because of the space provided. Simon Says, Musical Chairs and games like those were well received for our students because they loved to participate in every single game.

• Mention 8 activities from chapters 3 through 6 that you haven’t tried in your classes. Which of the 8 activities may work in your teaching context? Which of the 8 activities may not work in your teaching context? Explain why they may or may not work.

We did not do any type of activity that involves the writing skill because none of our students were capable of doing it. They even cannot write in spanish perfectly, so that is why we decided to not do that. We were comparing and discussing that we cannot do all of the activities presented in chapter 3 because they involve the speaking skill, and our students are so young and they can barely talk. Pair work, discussions and activities like those maybe can function, but with older students. Be older does not mean that you can understand and talk perfectly in english, but they will try to do it because it sounds interesting for them. As a conclusion we think that students from 4 to 6 years old love to do speaking activities because they learn how to pronounce their native words in a new language.