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Category Archives: Pre-school Children


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Music Makes It Stick

Musical notesSusan Banman Sileci, Everybody Up co-author, has a confession to make…

I have a confession to make: I forget to use music in my classroom. And then something happens that reminds me that using music to teach – not just to kids but to teenagers and adults, too – is one of the best ways to help them learn. It seems obvious, but I forget all the time. I use flashcards. I play games. I teach culture and history and I tell stories. But I forget to use music. Crazy, isn’t it?

Part of the problem is that I teach teenagers, between 12 and 16 years old. My eight students are children who live in one of the poorest areas of São Paulo, Brazil: Campo Limpo. They’re part of a special educational program that removed them from their overcrowded and undisciplined public schools and put them in a private school. I teach them once a week. Our classroom is in one of their homes, on a long table made of wooden planks set upon boxes, and the room’s one electrical outlet is on the other side of the room. The book we use, Oxford University Press’s Engage, is great. But Engage, like most books for teenagers, doesn’t come with a music program. As a result, I often forget how much these kids love music and how effective music can be.

I’m one of the authors of Everybody Up. This is a primary series which comes with an incredible music program and is entering the second year of its outstanding and award-winning Global Sing-Along. You wouldn’t think I’d need reminders to use music! But I do. Here’s a story for you.

Before the books were ready, I received a sample CD of some of the music. I had the CD in my car and was giving several of my teenage students a ride to school after our class. My students love Beyoncé and laugh at Justin Bieber (although they won’t let me change the radio station when he’s on), and one listens to Guns N’ Roses in preparation for his career as a rock star. Instead of turning on the radio, I decided to keep listening to my new CD. A song for the Starter level, Boys and Girls, came on. The music was obviously for very young children.

And my ‘too cool’ teenage students learned the words the first time, divided themselves into boys and girls and sang the song repeatedly. We drove through Campo Limpo with the windows down – past lines of laundry, small shacks and a large trash heap, through a park known for its drug dealers, over speed bumps and in front of the brick homes of one of their family members. ‘There’s my cousin,’ Camila laughed, and shouted, ‘Hi boy!’ out the window. The boy waved.

So, are we really too cool?

With these teenagers, I can use Everybody Up songs and they’re happy to learn them. They laugh. It’s kiddie music, but they always listen carefully, learn, and leave the class singing the song. I also like to use songs from the radio. We recently listened to Katy Perry’s Firework. It’s a song they know but never understood. They’re beginner students so I use a variety of techniques with songs, especially with complicated, non-ELT songs:

  • I don’t expect them to learn the entire song. That can be difficult, requires a lot of L1, and is certainly hard to remember five minutes after class is over.
  • I pick out a grammar point or a set of vocabulary. I pre-teach that language and give them the lyrics printed out with those parts missing. They listen, sometimes several times, to fill in the blanks with pre-taught material.
  • We talk about the general message of the song and listen one more time.
  • We talk about the cultural differences the song exposes. Elvis’s Blue Christmas surprised my students because something blue in Portuguese is happy. Thayza refused to believe me that ‘blue’ meant sad, but she’s beginning to accept the concept!
  • If there’s time, they can do post-listening activities like inventing dance routines, researching the singer or the song, or finding other songs with similar lyrics or messages.

I’ve made a personal goal of using a song – any song – at least once a month. I’m learning that if a song meets a need, students, no matter their age, don’t care if it’s a song for children, for Elvis fans, or for future rock musicians. There’s always something to be learned, and music makes it stick.

What about you? What’s your experience with mixing music styles in the classroom?

Visit our site for more information on Everybody Up and the Everybody Up Global Sing-along 2013.

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The Young Explorer’s World of Nature

Everybody Up author Patrick Jackson rediscovers his favourite book from childhood after 35 years and asks if it can teach materials writers and young learner educators anything.

Young Explorer's World of NatureThe Young Explorer’s World of Nature

I’ve just found my favourite book from when I was a boy. It’s called The Young Explorer’s World of Nature and it was published in 1957 by Sampson Low, Marston. It’s nearly four decades since I last looked at it but every page comes right back to me like it was yesterday. I loved nature and spent a lot of time looking under rocks in the garden. What was it about The Young Explorer’s World of Nature that kept me reaching for it? What fascinated me about that one book so much? Is there anything in that fascination that will help me now as a teacher and materials writer?

The first thing to mention is the variety of the content.  This is an adventure that spans the whole world, from creatures living in a pond to an armadillo’s burrow, to giant redwoods, to the Kalahari Desert. Woodpeckers, beavers, bees and a bush pig, a bathyscaphe, people who live with herds, a frilled lizard, a wolverine, a vet examining a sick chimpanzee and a man milking a reindeer into a bowl all jostle for attention. This variety keeps you turning the pages. Likewise, lessons and materials should be varied and have plenty of surprises to keep our students on their toes.

Animals running from volcano

There is a sense of wonder throughout the book. Nature and our relationship with it is something to marvel at. These images were my connections to a wider world beyond suburban Dublin. Although most of the pages showed scenes beyond my imagination, some of them were about things closer to home: a cat with an injured paw, a toad in a half-buried flower pot or sycamore seeds that spin as they fall – all fascinated me as much as the Kirghiz chief riding along with a falcon on his arm. We should never forget that plenty of miracles are very close at hand and do our best to bring them into our classrooms.

Every single page of the book is full of action. A frog dives into the water, a musk ox tosses a wolf high into the air, a baboon bangs his chest and a puffin catches a rabbit’s foot just as it enters its burrow. Most memorably, a hippopotamus overturns an African canoe as two crocodiles watch intently from the bank, one showing its sharp teeth. As a rule, crocodiles should be kept out of the classroom but we should never forget how much children are verb-driven creatures and bring as many opportunities to do as we can into our teaching.

Wild buffalo

Every page is rich with detail. To think it was all done by hand without a computer in sight! There isn’t a photograph in the whole book either so this had to be made up for by the excitement of the drawings and the events they show. There’s plenty to take from that too. As we surround ourselves and our students with the digital and the instant we shouldn’t forget that something hand-made and personal usually has the value of a thousand clicks.

These images leave as many questions unanswered as they answer. Will the squirrel catch that dragonfly? Will the man who looks a bit like Charlie Chaplin get out of the pot-hole? What happened to that camel’s leg and can you really bandage them like that? Are Tasmanian Devils dangerous? Will I ever see cormorant fishermen or listen to lions roaring just beyond a thorn hedge?

This book comes from an age when people had fewer tools at their disposal and had to work harder to captivate the young explorer’s imagination. There is much for us to learn 55 years on as we do our work in a world utterly changed. We have so much power at our fingertips but do we appreciate that power enough? Do we make the most of it? Would we sometimes be better off with less?

I learnt a lot from my trip down memory lane. The Young Explorer’s World of Nature is full of variety, adventure, surprise and wonder, connections to a wider world, action and movement, fascinating detail, discovery and metamorphosis and I suppose, without realising it at the time, that’s why I loved it so much. All those happenings and all those questions both answered and unanswered!

Those are not just the ingredients of a great children’s book, they are the ingredients of great language teaching, the ingredients of beautiful and effective education and, ultimately, the ingredients of happy childhood. Think back to your favourite book when you were a child. What can you learn from it today?

Visit our site for more information on Everybody Up and the Everybody Up Global Sing-along 2013.

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Early Intervention: Why it’s a must for children with reading difficulties

Teacher helping young girl to readIn this article, Tanya Rivka Dy-Peque, an educational therapist who has worked closely with children with learning difficulties for several years, explores why early intervention in reading is so crucial to children’s future literacy.

If your child doesn’t learn to read, they are more likely to have social problems, develop a poor self-image, and earn less than their peers as adults.

Hearing this shouldn’t come as any great shock. After all, reading is central to daily life for most of us. Even if we don’t consider ourselves big “readers,” we still read bills, ads, emails, websites, and correspondence at work.

But for people who never learned to read, or who can only read a little, everyday life is a constant battle of faking their way through a literate world, hoping they don’t slip up. To combat this problem, a number of adult literacy programs have sprung up, but most research shows that it’s much more difficult – and time-consuming – for adults to become literate. In fact, even high school and middle school programs for slower learners seem to be a case of too little, too late.

Now, that’s not to say that older kids and adults can’t learn – quite the opposite. But the job does get tougher the more time passes and the more we struggle. This kind of failure – without proper help and guidance – makes us withdraw further and try less because we’d rather fake our way through than endure ridicule – real or perceived.

Luckily, the answer is right in front of us, because many students have shown marked improvement – so long as they have that proper help and guidance we mentioned, and provided they get it early enough.

How early?

By some estimates, students who find themselves struggling may begin to withdraw by as early as the middle of first grade! That’s why the most successful early intervention programs in schools tend to start before primary school and work to catch issues as they’re developing rather than discovering them after the fact and attempting to fix them.

So what are some common features of successful early intervention programs?

Everyday help

In the same way that going to a foreign country can help you to learn the language by immersing you in it, students having difficulties with reading and writing need to be receiving extra help as often as possible – preferably every school day. Moreover, these daily sessions should last at least 20 to 30 minutes, and at-risk kids need to be given an ample number of sessions to improve (several programs recommend around 100 extra sessions).

Small group and individual learning in combination with full classroom sessions

The tendency when dealing with at-risk students is to isolate them into smaller units and even one-on-one tutoring so that educators can give them their full focus. That kind of strategy is helpful in increasing literacy, but studies have shown that it should not replace full-classroom learning. Something about the communal power of learning to read and write together appears to enhance the process.

Meaning over memorization

With our increasing focus on test scores as a means of measuring aptitude, too many teachers expect students to learn from simple repetition, assuming that they either already know or will catch on to the meaning of the word over time. Unfortunately, this is not always true for at-risk students, so successful early prevention programs put a focus on making sure that the meaning of each word is clearly understood before moving on. This helps to create context and a real-world connection for many words.

A concentration on words

Too often, kids experiencing reading difficulties are asked to put words together into sentences before they understand the words themselves. Early prevention programs start from the bottom up, concentrating on words as the building blocks of sentences and slowly grouping them together to form simple phrases.

Writing as a means of word identification

To reinforce word recognition, successful early prevention programs often have students write out and spell words. Teacher assistance is provided, but only to the extent that students need it to spell words correctly.

Building confidence through re-reading

One of the best ways to increase reading confidence is to encourage students to read books over and over. This allows them to become comfortable with the words and meaning of the story, instead of forcing them to struggle through something new too quickly.

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Creating opportunities for kids to interact with stories

Story timeErika Osváth, an educator, English teacher and materials writer from Hungary, talks about some different ways for kids to interact with stories.

My friend, who teaches English literature at ELTE University in Budapest told me the other day “I wanted to read this book, which is said to be interesting, written in exquisite language, but I just cannot make myself finish it, even though I am now on page 400. I just cannot connect with anything and anybody in the book.”

This sheds a little light on why we read in our everyday lives. What is the engine, the personal motive that makes us read a story or a book? If I turned my friend’s comment into a definition, she doesn’t read to see if she understands the story, neither to explicitly learn a particular language point, but through reading she satisfies her fundamental need to connect with the storyline and/or its characters. I believe this is the case with most of us when it comes to free reading.

And yet in the language classroom, very often all we have time for (and what the course-books helps our approach to stories with) are the comprehension check activities and some language work based around the text of the story. The one and only way we tend to encourage children to connect with the storyline and/or characters on an emotional level is through acting. I firmly believe, however, that there’s room and need for much deeper engagement forms of authentic interaction with stories, which will help them internalise language in an unconscious and effortless manner.

Here are some activities you can use to go beyond comprehension check and help children engage with stories on an emotional level at lower levels.

After directed reading, i.e. a story chosen by the teacher:

Interacting with the characters:

  1.   Ask children to draw their favourite character or the one they dislike, if appropriate, and fill in the sentence.”I really like him/her because he/she is/can/…” – here, choose verbs that are appropriate for the storyline.

    “I didn’t like him/her because …”

  2. Go through the story again and ask children to stick adjectives to the characters at different stages of the story, for example naughty, cross, careless, attentive, helpful, etc. Alternatively, you could use the faces representing some of these words, if possible, and ask them to justify their choices in L1.
  3. Ask children to match colours, shapes or sounds of musical instruments to characters and let them explain why. In my experience they love doing such abstract things.

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The universal benefits of songs as teaching tools

Children singing in classSongs are a great way for children to learn English. In this post, Devon Thagard, co-owner of Super Simple Learning and songwriter for the new Primary level course, Everybody Up, explores the benefits of using songs in class.

This past year, I had the great pleasure to be involved in the Everybody Up Global Sing-along as one of the songwriters, a contest judge, and a workshop leader. The entire experience reinforced and reminded me of the strong feelings I have about 1) the power of songs in the classroom, and 2) the importance of learning from other teachers.

The Global Sing-along received over 70 entries from countries all over the world. When you see classrooms around the world all enjoying singing the same songs, it really brings home the universal benefits of songs as teaching tools. Songs allow all ages to participate and learn at their levels. In the Global Sing-along videos, we see pre-schoolers and kindergartners (like these great students from Ukraine) doing some very simple dancing, picking up a few words, and getting a feel for the rhythm. For very young students who are just beginning to learn English, songs provide a fun, welcoming way to get that oh-so-valuable input, and gestures and dancing help them understand and internalize the meaning.

Older and more advanced students are able go beyond the basics and to express their creativity with songs. As students move into higher grades, they may be a little more reluctant to sing and dance as they did in kindergarten, but that doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy learning with songs, and the benefits of the repeated exposure to comprehensible input continue. At all ages, students are learning vocabulary, pronunciation, intonation, the rhythm of the language, listening skills, and more. Here are some great examples from Thailand, Korea, Turkey and France.

It’s also fantastic to be able to visit our fellow teachers’ classrooms around the world through video. Just having the chance to see how the classrooms are arranged and decorated sparks a lot of great ideas, but being able to see how teachers are using dance, crafts, instruments, and drama together with songs is really inspiring. If you haven’t already, browse the playlist of Global Sing-along videos. I’m sure you’ll come away from it with several great ideas for your classroom.

How do you use songs in your classes?

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