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
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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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    1. Set new goals

    Students may lose interest in classes or feel discouraged when they don't have a clear target to work towards. If this is the case with your class, have them write up a list of five new goals they'd like to achieve.

    These goals must be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely. So rather than just saying "I'd like to learn more vocabulary", have students make it SMART.

    For example:

    Specific: "I'd like to learn new advanced vocabulary to use in my writing."

    Measurable: "I'll test myself to see if I can define and use 20 new words in sentences."

    Achievable: "I will dedicate 2 hours a week to studying the definitions and writing example sentences in context."

    Relevant: "This will help me get a good score in myas I struggle with formal academic language."

    Timely: "I will learn 20 new words by the end of September."

    If learners find it difficult to think of goals, ask them to write one for each language skill: listening, reading, writing and speaking. You can also refer to the GSE Teacher Toolkit, which has hundreds of learning objectives organized by age, level, skill type and more.

    The idea is to encourage them to set clear objectives, giving them an exciting new challenge to work towards for the year ahead.

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    Students may lose interest in improving their English if they've only been studying in a classroom. They may see it as something boring and unrelated to their real lives.

    A great way to tackle this is by encouraging them to talk with English speakers outside of class. By doing this, they'll pick up new vocabulary and expressions, giving them more confidencein their language abilities.

    Suggest that they attend a language exchange.andaregreat platforms to find regular language exchange events in their local area. While this is suitable for intermediate learners and above, it may be a bit daunting for beginners.

    In this case, the appmay be a suitable alternative. Similar to a language exchange, learners can connect with people from around the world. They can choose people with a similar level as them and either write messages, send short audios, or do video calls, depending on their ability and confidence.

    Communicating with real people is a fun and encouraging reason for your learners to want to improve.

    3. Introduce interesting new vocabulary

    Students may become disheartened if they've been learning for years but aren't seeing much progress. A simple and effective way to help them improve their level is by encouraging them toexpand their vocabulary.

    They already have to study a lot of vocabulary from their textbooks, so why not give it a more personal twist and ask for suggestions of topics that interest them?

    Maybe they are gamers and want to learn how to communicate better with other players around the world. Select vocabulary about styles of games, turn-taking, and strategizing that they could use – they can practice in class and be thrilled to be given homework.

    Perhaps some of your students want to study or work abroad. This may be a common topic, but one thing that is not frequently discussed is how to deal with the paperwork of living in another country. For example, getting into more specific language about banking, housing rentals, or setting up wifi will help them feel more confident about their move. Though these things differ between countries, there is a lot of overlapping vocabulary and roleplaying will do wonders to reassure and excite them about their upcoming adventures.

    By allowing your students to take control of their learning, their motivation is naturally higher and you too will enjoy finding out specific language about their interests.

    4. Work on specific problem areas

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    For example, if students are experiencing difficulties with reading comprehension, you could try introducing more varied reading materials. Ask them to bring in blog posts, magazines and news articles on topics that they find interesting. Highlight keywords in the text to enhance their understanding of the piece and create comprehension questions similar to the test format they'll take.

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    5. Change your class format

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    Use interactive games

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    Hold class debates

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    Throw in some unexpected activities to bring students' attention back to class and spark their interest in learning again.