How To Make An ESL Curriculum

For beginner teachers I usually give them a set of 20 basic lessons to work through, and they’re pretty much the same as the first 20 lessons on the curriculum page here. These have been proven to be popular with the kids, have lots of useful English and importantly are especially easy to teach. But from then on flexibility is the key. Ideally you want to cover all the GE themes, but not all kids will want to do things in the same order or at the same time.

And of course this applies to teachers as well. Plus because different schools start at different times of the year, you don’t want to be doing Winter Clothes in June or Ice Cream Flavours in December. Unless you’re in the south of course! You choose & it’s your baby! So instead of dictating the order to do things I usually ask the teachers to choose which themes they’d like to do, which gives them a lot more investment in the curriculum and makes it their own.

I do this by covering a huge table with the printed lesson plans so they can see everything at once. They also start acting like kids in a sweet shop choosing which ones to do! Then I go through with them and tweak things to make it easier to flow from one section to the other, and that the activities build on the language as you go along.

You could of course go even further with this idea and get the kids to make their own curriculum at the start of term! One thing the teachers did last time was to teach the Animal Voices theme before doing the Do you like animals, Their rationing was that traditionally singulars should be taught before plurals.

Then instead of worrying whether to put an “s” on the end of things or not, if you start with plurals the rule to make a singular is simple “If there’s an s, chop it off. If not leave it as it is.” This saves a lot of confusion for the kids!

This also explains why they thought there were too many words in one lesson, because if you do the Animal Voices song first you actually have 20 pieces of vocab in one lesson! Doing Do you like animals, The teachers today were also wanting to do the What time is it,

This is in first grade. In private settings I have no problem with this. But in primary school it’s always best to try and co-ordinate English with the other subjects. In most countries telling the time is only taught in 2nd grade. So it seems illogical to include time in English class before that. But today they said their kids could already tell the time and it would impress the parents if they could tell the time in English before other classes could do it in Chinese!

One very good thing was that the teachers were wanting to include the very, very important Is it…, I always try and do it as soon as I can. One really good way the teachers in Japan did it last year was to do the game first in Japanese. This gets over the difficult part of developing the describing skill without any extra difficult of using English. Once the kids get good enough to do the game in their own language they really, really enjoy it!

So then you can say, OK how about an extra challenge, let’s try doing in English! The kids are usually really up for it then! Making a curriculum is fun, it’s like picking out skills you’d like to have. Oh, I’d like to be able to say that, and that, and that!

Plus playing through the songs and games for each theme as you make the curriculum really makes you want to teach them right now because they are so fun. All the themes were chosen from language the kids like to say, but that’s usually also fun language for teachers to learn as well.