Children learn through routines, relationships, stories and purposeful activity, within their ZPD. Affect and management are preconditions for learning, not extras.
Where the sources disagree
- Rhythm vs meaning first: Harding da Rosa leads with chants and songs (phonology, chunks); Read with relationships, ZPD and stories. Complementary layers of the same lesson.
Carol Read
- Pitch tasks inside the ZPD and hand over support
- Behaviour management is mostly pre-emption
- Descriptive praise beats evaluative praise
- Question purposefully - socio-psychological vs pedagogical questions
- Learning to learn starts in primary
- Flexibility within a planned framework
- Kinesthetic activity must have a learning purpose
- Stories as shared contexts for language
Cross-source
More notes (by source)
Alfie Kohn
- Five reasons to stop saying Good job
Book - To Children I Give My Heart (Sukhomlynsky) - Know your learners before you plan
Cambridge English Teacher Resources - Starters to Flyers - teach through meaning, know the format
Cambridge World of Better Learning - Neuroinclusive classrooms - six pillars
- Start a Cambridge exam course from the handbook and word lists
Carol Read (ABC of Teaching Children) - Jazz chants - a six-step procedure
- Multiple intelligences as a variety checklist, with four provisos
- Name the age band - young learners is a catch-all
- Oracy - talking to learn, not just learning to talk
- The C-Wheel - eight conditions for children’s learning
Collins ELT - Teach dictionary skills to young learners through games
Edutopia - Handwriting beats typing for encoding
IH World (IH Teach English) - Activity repertoire - texts, mingles and dice
- Very young and young learner classes - pacing, routines, fairness
Jane-Maria Harding da Rosa (TEYL) - Chants train stress-timed rhythm
- Mini-books as tactile literacy
- Project-based learning needs language input at every stage
- Songs carry chunks and phonology
- The silent period and listen-and-do
Lizzie Pinard - Make metacognition explicit in lessons
Scott Thornbury (An A-Z of ELT) - Scaffolding must be withdrawn - transfer of control
Side Notes on ELT (Lina Gordyshevskaya) - Affective reading - add personal and emotional engagement to a text
- Visualise sentence stress with audiograms
Teaching English with Oxford - Songs as varied repetition - useful ideas, shaky MI framing
TeachingEnglish (British Council) - English in Uzbek state primary schools - Copland et al. 2024
The TEFL Zone (Rachel Tsateri) - The oral exit ticket
Visualising Ideas (Naomi Epstein) - Choral participation can hide misperception
From my books (highlights)
- Source - Book - 101 Tips for Teaching Primary Children (Carol Read)
- Source - Book - Introducing English to Young Children (Opal Dunn) - first volume
- Source - Book - Introducing English to Young Children (Opal Dunn)
- Source - Book - Teaching Kids to Think (Darlene Sweetland)
- Source - Book - To Children I Give My Heart (Sukhomlynsky)
- Source - Book - To Children I Give My Heart - my notes
Key terms (DELTA M1)
ZPD · scaffolding · handover · routines · stir vs settle (Halliwell) · TPR · CLIL · descriptive praise · learner training · picturebooks · learning styles (myth)
Already in my vault
- 101 Tips for Teaching Primary Children
- To Children I Give My Heart - Sukhomlinsky (notes)
- Dunn: Introducing English to Young Children
- Sweetland: Teaching Kids to Think
Open questions
- Read next: Cameron, Teaching Languages to Young Learners (2001); Pinter, Teaching Young Language Learners (2nd ed. 2017). Both are cited by Conti and core for CTYL.