4) Listening, Oral work, Reading, writing

 4) Listening, Oral work, Reading, writing 

a) Describe how you would teach these skills. Which is the most difficult skill to teach? Contrast your ideas as a kindergarden teacher in El Salvador with the theory given in the books.

There certain ways to teach those skills to children, but i think that we should be unique doing this. O f couse we should let aside the book guidelines because it helps us to be excellent teachers. I surely follow the idea of listen and do activities because we can make use of from the moment we start the English lessons is giving genuine instructions. Besides, we can see if the children have understood the message or not. However, the book also gives us another way to teach listening to children which is moving about. As we know children need exercise and movement, and we must make this possible. We could ask the children do all sorts of crazy things. The more language the children learm, the more we can ask them to do. The advantage of this activity is that we can see how much the children have understood. We have to keep in mind that we have to be totally dinamyc with kids because they get bored easily. My favorite way to teach would be through drawings because we can improve two things at the same time, the ability of drawing and listening.

Oral work is a good way to still improve our English skills, but it is necessary to pay close attention to what children want to say because sometimes it is kind of difficult to transmit ideas or we do not know how to say something.We know that speaking is maybe the most demandingskill for the teacher to teach, but to master this skill, it is necessary to improve fluency, listening, etc. With the oral work children are able to express emotions, communicate intentions and reactions. To improve the oral skill, it is necessary to get vocabulary. The more vocabulary children get, the more they will speak clearly. One of the ways that i would to teach children oral skills is through songs. I really like to play the guitar and the ukelele. So, it would be great to use them to teach children some songs to inhance fluency.

Reading is an important skill to develop with children. The printed word becomes the main source of expanding and streightening the language. Books play an important role in the kind of teaching because they open up other worlds to young children, making reading an enjoyable activity is a very important part of the language learning experience. We can teach reading to children through phonics. This approach is based on letters and sounds. Basically, we teach the students the letters of the alphabet, and the combination of letters, phonically as they are actually pronounced. Another to teach reading would be through this activity calld "whole sentence reading". Basically, here we are going to teach recognition of whole phrases which have meaning in themselves. I have not had the opportunity to teach through this way, but if could, i would use short stories like fairytales or magazines that catch children attention. It is recommendable that these story brings a bunch of drawings because children like this kind of stories because it makes it less boring.

Writing is one of the most difficult skills to teach because we known that most of the words do not sound as they are pronounced that is why we have to be careful while teaching writing. One of the disadvatage this skill brings to us is that we cannot make the same use of body language, intonation, tone, eye contact and all the other features which help us to convey meaning when we talk. Besides, many children take a long time to master the skill of writing, but not all the children are the same because there are some of them that learn faster than the other ones, but we must take children at the same path.

At my point of view, speaking is the hardest skill in English because it is extremely difficult to make a meaningful conversation with a complete strange in a foreign language. To teach speaking to children can be so difficult because it combines the other skills, and everybody wants to learn how to speak in English without focusing on reading, writing, etc. These is kind of impossible because to posses the ability to talk is necessary to improve the other ones since these skills perfect the ability of speaking. The problem with speaking is that it has to be normal-paced and there is little time for us to think before speaking.

b) Which of activities featured on chapter 3 through 6 would you try in your classes? Why?

I would focus on the listenig activities because i think that there are more things to develop in the children. Many children do not like this skill because they find it difficult, but it is not difficult; the think is that teachers do not teach it correctly. There are many activities to enhance listening. For example, we could put into practice the ability of drawing. How do we could use the ability of drawing to improve listening skill? Well, we could play an audio related with somethings that children like. For example, we have animals, dinosaurs, toys etc. They can draw what they listen so that they improve the listening skills, but they also feed the desire of drawing. I really love drawing i can surely say that if any teacher would do an activity related with drawing, i would really learn a lot because it is something that catches my eye.