Four ways to keep kindergarten ESL students focused all day

Heath Pulliam
A teacher sat in a classroom with a child, sharing crayons with eachother and smiling
Reading time: 5 minutes

Heath Pulliam is an independent education writer with a focus on the language learning space. He’s taught English in South Korea and various subjects in the United States to a variety of ages. He’s also a language learning enthusiast and studies Spanish in his free time.

Those who have taught children anywhere between the ages of 4 and 8 know that one of the biggest challenges of getting through to them is keeping your presentation style interesting. As someone who taught ESL in South Korea to kindergarteners, there are a few factors that make keeping students engaged a challenge. In countries where students learn English, students often have a heavy courseload and high expectations. As a first-year teacher, I learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t through trial and error. These are four methods that I consistently used to keep my students interested and engaged all day.

Students are quick to lose focus at such a young age. You’re not speaking their mother tongue and some parts of an ESL curriculum are less than exciting. With young students, you can’t lecture your way through the material all day. Kindergarteners have a small window of focus and it must be capitalized on. The following methods are ones that worked for me and can be modified to cover any topic you’ll run into in an ESL curriculum.

Activities to engage pre-primary ESL students all day
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1.The wheel of names

Don't let the simplicity of this tool fool you. The Wheel of Names, which is exactly what it sounds like, is a very simple tool that you can put the names of your students on to randomly (or not) select a student. The Wheel of Names crushes hand-raising and it’s a constant struggle to get everyone raising their hands. (We can’t let the quiet ones just slip through the cracks!)

The beauty of the Wheel of Names is the guaranteed excitement on every spin. They’re kindergarteners. The nature of randomizing who’s going to answer the question, come up to the board, or go first in a game is so exciting to them. Use it however you want. The suspense has kids excited to see who will be chosen and has them cheering on whichever classmate gets chosen.

I used this tool mostly during review sessions to choose students to answer questions. It can also be used for creating small groups, making sure everyone gets a chance to speak during activities and seeing who’s going to get to do the next fun thing in the classroom. You’re teaching kindy, have fun with it.

2.Team-based review game

We never came up with a good name for this game, but we used it a lot. Every Friday, during our chapter review, this was undoubtedly the best compromise between fun and effectiveness for reviewing material. It also fosters speaking, one of the most important parts of learning a language.

Here’s how it works. The class is separated into two teams. (For a little extra fun, use the wheel of names or a cup of popsicle sticks with students’ names on them to select the teams.) The teacher has a set of review questions or vocabulary words. On each turn, one person from each team has a chance to answer the question. You can do hand-raising or a randomization method to pick who answers.

If the student representative from the team gets it right, they earn a point. If they get it wrong, the opposing team gets a chance to answer for a point. Alternating between each team, the first to a certain number of points wins. A simple game, but at this age many students are just getting used to team-based activities.

This game is so effective because it makes use of children’s natural competitive spirit. When one student is up, the rest of their team cheers them on. Learning material is important, but a big part of teaching young students is teaching them social skills, too. This game gets everyone excited and gets the material to stick. It also teaches them the importance of teamwork and how to win and lose gracefully. (Not everyone can win every time).

3.Creating super sentences

At the end of the year, the students in my class ended up being the best writers in their respective age groups. I think this activity, making ‘Super Sentences” a few times a week was a big contributor to that. Inspired by a textbook we had, here’s how this activity works.

We’d create sentences with this formula:

Who or what – The owl

Did what – hunted for mice

Where – in the forest

When – at night

The owl hunted for mice in the forest at night.

Before students got to work on their own, We’d fill out a little table on the board as a class that looked something like this – but changed every time.

Who or what?

(noun)

Did what? (verb)

Where?

(prepositional phrase)

When?

(prepositional phrase)

The dog

The raccoon

Joey

Mr. Heath

Chloe

The thief

Ran

Slept

Attacked _______

Found _________

Learned to ________

sneaked

On top of __________

Under __________

Through the ________

Next to the ________

Inside of the _______

Behind the ________

At sunset

At 4:00 PM

In the middle of the day

In March

In the evening

After this, students can get to work making their own sentences and drawing what is happening below. After a few times, many students began to make up their own nouns, verbs and prepositions that were not listed on the board. And when everyone gets comfortable writing sentences, you can add a ‘Why?’ section at the end.

This activity is one of my favorites because it helps bring out children’s natural creativity. In an ESL curriculum, there’s a lot of material that’s less than exciting, so any way to give the kids a little freedom can be a game-changer. It’s also great for vocabulary, grammar and writing practice.

To finish off the activity, have each student read their sentence and have the class vote on their favorite for a prize!

4. Vocabulary bingo

Something to know about teaching ESL in non-English-speaking countries is that often, no time is allowed to be spent not learning. This is definitely the case in South Korea. Even after lunch and towards the end of the day, students are rarely allowed to do anything if it isn’t enriching. Because of this, playing games that are fun and learning-effective is a must.

Now, I’m certainly not the first one to play Bingo. This version however, is slightly modified to be as enriching as possible. We played this version often at the end of the day, because focus runs low around that time.

Essentially, this is just vocabulary bingo with a little bit of charades mixed in. For this activity, make a basic bingo board with some of your current vocabulary words or target language. There are plenty of sites that make this easy.

What makes this version different is that on each turn, rather than telling everyone the word, describe it to the class and try to get them to guess what the word is. So, if the word was ‘teamwork’, you might say something like “This is what it’s called when everyone works together to help their team win.” You can even have a student helper that helps facilitate the game by giving the descriptions.

After the word is guessed, reiterate it to the class and proceed with Bingo as usual.

Conclusion

Part of being an effective teacher, especially with the younger ages, is harnessing kids’ natural excitement, energy and innate curiosity to their own benefit. Instead of suppressing it, it’s essential to adapt your teaching style to work for your students.

Teaching ESL to young children has its own set of challenges. They can hardly sit still for an hour of lecture, let alone a whole day. Make use of, or draw inspiration from these methods and see how they can work for you.

Teaching young learners? Read our posts '8 first lesson problems for young learners' and 'Effective classroom management routines for very young learners'.

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    4 key challenges in secondary education

    By Anna Roslaniec

    Let’s examine four of the most common challenges secondary teachers have and look into some strategies to help solve them.

    1. My students are afraid of making mistakes

    You’re not alone! Many teachers say their teenage students are quiet and unwilling to answer questions in class. Sometimes, this might simply be because they don’t know the answers, but more often than not, they are nervous about making mistakes.

    When children grow into teenagers, they tend to become more self-conscious and worried about what their peers think of them – and making mistakes in public is a big no-no for them. However, there are several ways to facilitate a safe learning environment where your students are happy and willing to talk. Sometimes, though, it takes a little experimentation. Here are some things you can try:

    Celebrate mistakes

    When students make mistakes, ensure that you praise them for taking a risk or making an effort. Correct their errors and be clear with the rest of the class that the only way to learn is to try new things.

    Be firm

    Don’t tolerate any bullying or laughing when someone gets an answer wrong. If your students fear that others will mock them for their efforts, they’ll stay quiet. So make sure you have clear rules and that your students understand that mistakes are normal and to be expected.

    Have students discuss their answers in pairs or groups

    If your students are painfully shy and afraid of making mistakes, avoid picking on individuals to answer questions in front of the class. Instead, when asking a question, tell your students to discuss it in pairs or small groups first. This will allow them to formulate their ideas and feel more confident. Afterwards, you can ask the pairs to share what they discussed – leading to a natural open-class discussion.

    Listen to your students

    Another, powerful way of engaging your students in discussion is to listen to a conversation they are having with their partners and then express how impressed you are with their ideas during a feedback session. E.g. “You said X, which I thought was very interesting. Could you explain this to the class? It was a great idea.” This gives them the confidence to share their thoughts.

    2. My students are not engaged with the activities I choose

    This is another very common problem for teachers of teenagers. You spend a lot of time thinking of fun, interesting activities – then, when you present them to the class, your students look away and say they’re bored. Soon enough, you’ll get frustrated and not know how to re-engage them. Here are some ideas to help:

    Get to know your students

    Without fail, the best way to engage your students is by getting to know them as individuals over the year. Find out about their hobbies and interests outside of school, and learn what makes them laugh and what worries them. Use your knowledge of your students to find interesting books to read, videos to watch, or relevant subjects to discuss. This way, you’ll deliver tailored lessons your students find truly interesting and useful.

    Allow a degree of autonomy

    Sometimes quietness is also a sign of disengagement with the learning materials. To get past this obstacle, you can get your students to brainstorm things that interest them in groups, list them on the board and have a class vote on the topic of their next class project. As a teacher, you always have the power to veto inappropriate ideas, but giving students a voice is a powerful way of making them feel valued and involved in their own education.

    Make things (a little) competitive

    Even teenagers love games! And play is an integral part of learning, as it allows our students to be themselves, have fun, and communicate freely at the same time. By allowing them to play language-focused games in class, they’ll soon forget their inhibitions and start talking.

    3. My students just want to do grammar exercises

    Language is all about communication, speaking, listening, reading and writing – yet all your students want to do is grammar exercises. Frustrating as this is, it’s probably a sign that our students are not confident in their speaking or listening abilities. Here’s what you can do:

    Encourage free language practice

    Grammar activities are very structured and there is often a clear answer. Day-to-day communications, however, are much freer, which can intimidate less confident students. This activity will help you combine the two aspects of language learning:

    • Put students in small groups and give them a set of cards with exciting topics printed on them—for example; music, sports, environment, school, vacations, friends, food.
    • Tell students that they should each choose a card and speak freely about their topic for 30 seconds – the short time will help them overcome their fear of speaking and can be gradually increased as they get used to this type of activity.
    • Have students record themselves when they are speaking and then, when they listen back, have them identify the grammatical structures they used.

    They should write down and correct any mistakes under your guidance. Not only will this get students used to talking and encourage a lot of emergent language, but it will also help them feel they are practicing grammar.

    If your students really enjoy learning grammar, you can ‘flip’ your grammar activities and make them more communicative. First, provide them with a series of sentences or listening clips which have a common grammatical structure (second conditional sentences, for example).

    Then have students work together (in English) to identify how the language is structured, so they can discover the grammar point for themselves. This not only gets them talking, but they are doing something they feel confident at.

    4. My students are bored of all the repetition

    Repetition is an important part of language learning. By practicing things over and over again, your students will come to understand it better and will be able to produce the language more easily. However, repetition is often quite dull, especially for fast learners. Here’s how you can make things more interesting for your teenage students:

    Use a greater variety of activities to engage your learners

    If you’ve been teaching your students a particular set of vocabulary, a grammatical structure, or some pronunciation rules, think about how else they can practice them.

    For example, instead of drilling pronunciation over and over again, ask students to think of all the words they can think of that have the same sound in them (e.g. book, look, cook, shook, etc.). This will help them ‘hear’ the sounds in their heads and improve their understanding of other words.

    If you have been learning vocabulary through reading, have students write or tell stories that incorporate the words.

    The idea is not to stop repeating the target language or skill, but to practice it in different ways. Apply this principle to other areas of language learning so your students won’t feel like they are repeating things.