3085. When I Taught Young Kids

If you’re a children teacher plus a foreign or second language teacher I would tell you something indispensable to utilize at the classroom is realia. Real things or realia.

When I taught young children in Jaén (south of Spain, a nice town), some twenty years ago I was recommended to use them, otherwise my students would not have understood me in English, our common target language. I was told by kind and great Mary Jane Amaya to use real objects and stuff as a vehicle for my students to understand me and learn English.

Young children cannot think of abstract things, so they need to see realia or real things. I can recall that I brought and should have brought to the classroom: ingredients of food packs, some basic foods, a salad ingredients (great Lucas Huijtbregts even used to make and cook a salad with his young students and in the end they ate up the salad they had made; sorry Lucas if I misspelled your last name), stationary material, fruits, posters (visual aids), etc.

Now I’d say and reckon those children classes were for specialized-in-young-children teachers, not for me maybe. Thus and therefore classes were colorful and picturesque, with all those things; things those students could see, touch, eat… I can now recall all those classes and the school with great affection. / Photo from: untitled elementary student chalkboard cnnn com. That nice school was and is single-sex education, so there were a male school and a female one in that town, of the same education corporation I mean.