Teaching Young Learners Using Games

Teaching young learners English as a foreign language can be challenging. You need lots of patience and the skill to teach important points in small chunks so that your students don’t get bored or fidgety.

The good news that you can use games teaching young learners English as a foreign language. Young students love to play and it’s a great way of teaching them vocabulary and getting them to listen and speak.

Games you can play while teaching young learners

• Origami Finger game – This is a perfect game to teach numbers, colours and body parts. Colour the outside squares and put numbers on the inside. Under the numbers write down an instruction such as touch your toes or pat your knee. You can see how to make the game here.

The student picks a colour, the child with the square must open and close the square the while spelling the colour. For example, they would say Y-E-L-L-O-W. After that they choose a number and they once again open and close the square to match the number. They can do this once or twice. Then the student chooses another number and opens up the flap to read the instruction.

• Old Macdonald Finger Puppets – Your students will have fun making these finger puppets They don’t even need to be able to draw, you can print them from here so that they can be cut out and coloured.

Once they are done you can use them to sing Old Macdonald’s Farm which is a fun way of teaching young learners about farm animals.

• Make a monster – If you’re teaching body parts why not get the students to make a giant monster. You dictate to them what they need to draw. For example, two heads, three eyes etc. When they have completed the monster let them use glitter, pieces of material and torn up paper to colour it in.

Afterwards they can then label the monster which will help them to remember the different body parts and teaching young learners how to spell them.

Teaching young learners English as a foreign language is hard work, but if you make it fun, you’ll enjoy the lessons too.