Editorial: Focus on Young Learners

Dear colleagues,

Researchers on bilingual education report that “immersion is the best and most successful method of foreign language learning at an early age”. Well, this month we're taking a look at our younger CLILers! My two-year-old daughter amazes me frequently with her bilingual perspective on life and learning. When her mouse puppet didn't want to be bathed and her Bulgarian granny asked what we should do, my daughter said, “We should use suha voda (dry water)” – extremely sensible and logical.

Broad learning themes
If you go to the onestopclil section on onestopenglish and click the Young Learners link, you'll find 18 broad themes from plants to festivals bursting with resources for work in content and language with young learners.

Space materials
I particularly like the space materials in the Young Learners section on onestopclil. They are simple and straightforward, engaging and just the right level, like this counting worksheet, which can be coloured in by the students in the end.

Arts and crafts resources
I've mentioned the arts and crafts resources before but they're worth pointing out once more as I know from experience the treasure of activities where children work with shapes and create objects, cut things out, decorate and label them is great to have in your teaching kit. Two good examples on onestopclil are the shape exhibition and animals and their bodies.

More on body parts
Again to do with body parts but related to music, there is a very nice worksheet which links these two areas of the curriculum. Learners look at which parts of their body they use to play which instruments.

Experiments
The experiments for young learners on onestopclil deserve a strong place in an editorial like this one. You can take a look at the Gone with a bang experiment which gets children to make a bang-making instrument from paper. Noise is always popular! One experiment I've recently tried myself is the 360-degree periscope. This is great with young children who are fascinated with 'seeing round corners'. There is also a new experiment for you to try out this month – Build a sail-car of the future.

Question loops
Don't forget the question loops because I know they are popular among colleagues for getting talking going in their classrooms. Actually, this activity suits all ages! I use the science loops with groups of trainee language teachers as well as with children. It has to be one of the most learner-friendly activities (i.e. you can use it with the least communicative of groups), which integrates reading, speaking and listening. Take a look at the human skeleton and muscles question loop to see what I mean.

Methodology and other new materials
Carol Read has an article on Content-based learning in the primary classroom in the methodology section. It's a comprehensive look at integrating content and primary language learning and has just about all you need to think about in CLIL for young learners. Carol is also one of the authors of the Bugs website and has written the Amazing world of animals project, which is published this month on onestopclil. Kay Bentley gives us another TKT terminology article on the text type Recount.

As always, I appeal for some feedback! There is more and more for our community of teachers every month and it's great when colleagues write and tell us what they think of what they find. We welcome all feedback, positive and negative, and if you want to discuss issues you find interesting, write in to the onestopenglish Forum with comments. You can also send us your lessons to enter the ongoing lesson share competition. You could win books from the Macmillan Books for Teachers series.

Best wishes,
Keith