Teaching number

How to teach young learners about numbers

Assalamualaikum.

Teaching numbers to the beginner is always chalenging . Especially, those who live in non english speaking country, like in Indonesia. The main thing a teacher should understand is that our students must have concept of number in their mother language. They must be able to count numbers in their own language first unless we will get stuck in teaching them in the future.

Well, just start our lesson joyfully. Enter their world first and take them to our world. Ask the students the number of chairs, tables, or anything in the classroom using their mother language. Ensure that all students follow us and keep attractive.

Teacher : Repeat after me (use this frase in the beginning of our teaching and stress our intonation in this phrase or we can translate into the students' language. using this frase also means that we speak in target language and in the future they will understand while we speak it again)

Teacher : one (write the symbol on the whiteboard)
Students : one
Teacher : Two
Students : Two, etc

Ensure that we have each students' pronounce the words correctly. I find that they mispronounce three, five six, eight, thirteen,fifteen. I suggest to teach them 1 to 12 first.
If they are geting bored, we can use songs or quiz. Remember that we must keep the learning interesting.

We can use the modified songs they have known. I usually sing 'one and one'.
Now, if the students are good in this step, ask them in group or individually.
Teacher : Bayu, What number is it?
Bayu : one
Teacher : Good, what number is it?
Bayu : Six

Do this to the rest of the students. To check their understanding, we can random the number. We can also ask them the number of the things in the classroom.

Thanks.
Wassalamualaikum.

Learn English through Songs

Vocabulary needs to be revised again and again. Well, what could be better than studying vocabulary by listening to your favourite songs?

Read the lyrics first and try to understand them. You don’t have to translate the lyrics word by word, just try to find out what the song is all about. (Note: ‘Rap’ might not be practical as those songs usually contain slang words that not even ‘ordinary’ English native speakers know.)

Pick some words or phrases from the song that you would like to learn. If necessary, look up their exact meaning in a dictionary. A dictionary might also be useful to find other interesting phrases with the word.

Now, to learn the vocabulary, all you have to do is listening to the song again and again (that shouldn’t be a problem if it’s one of your favourite songs).