Giving Instructions Part 1

In preschool, it is not easy to accomplish students understanding and performing of what the instructions given by the teacher, since students at this age have low of logical thinking. Anyway, there is the advantage that they don´t block themselves and are most of the time willing to learn interesting and new things.

We should take into account that at this level, one of the most important skill including in the curriculum is listening, so the teacher needs to work a lot to improve the aspects related with it. This means, the teacher has to use a clear and easy to understand vocabulary, visual aids, TPR, gestures, etc. when giving instructions.

For this activity, I choose a language learning activity about family vocabulary including mom, dad, brother, sister, baby, grandma and grandpa in a preschool 1^st grade preschool students, and I focused on the instructions given to accomplish a task practicing vocabulary already learned to reinforce it.

First of all, the objective of the activity was students to practice vocabulary and understand the concept of family, working with some skills as using the scissors, the glue, and placing cutouts in a frame. To begin, I asked students what they see on the page, and they began to say a square, rectangle (it was hard to define what it was for them because there was not much difference on the lines measure), a family, a father, a mother, mom or dad, since some of they use one or the other. Then, was explaining what they were going to do acting looking for images of family members in a magazine, cutting them out, and paste them in the square. I was walking in front of the students to take the scissors from one table, the magazines from other one, to get a student to pay attention by going closing to him. These movements may cause distraction, but I used them as strategy to make sure students are following me. What I noticed is that even when they understood, I could speak a little more melodious, maybe also a little more slowly, and this would help for the two or three students that didn´t get the complete idea. I know that students got the idea and accomplished the activity rightly, three of them needed personal attention, but the reasons vary and they are not exactly about the instructions given.