I simply loved what the author of this site, Shelly Ann Vernon, asks us: "Do you have enough fresh ideas to be the most inspiring teacher that you possibly can?" WOW! What a question! As I'm always looking for new things, I read the clues she gives on how to work with children and now that I've got a 6 year old girl as one of my private students I'm really interested in learning how to deal with them. Teaching a child is completely different than teaching a teenager or an adult. First of all, we don't TEACH a child (as I read one of these days in another article) they LEARN - it's different. I also learned that planning a class for a child sometimes can be a waste of time because we have to follow their rules more than anything. We have to feel the environment and skip activities we think are not going to work. My student Manu, for example, sometimes she wants to play the game more than once and I allow her to because she's practicing anyway. Some other times, she feels like listening to the CD sitting on the floor. That's okay. Of course discipline is important and also the content we, teachers, have to transmit. But as the Beatles once said: "Let it be...". Manu has been a challenge for me even though I've already worked with children 'cause now I'm a private English teacher so she doesn't have colleagues to interact and also because she has a hearing problem which makes her even more intelligent and special. So now I'm ready to buy some puppets and follow one of Shelly's ideas: use a puppet to present the new vocabulary. I've never done that. I'll tell you afterwards if it worked or not with me, ok? An inspiring teacher! That's what I wanna be!
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