1) About learning and practicing English with English Music Playtime
At English Music Playtime, language and communication are core to our curriculum. Children are encouraged to volunteer, speak well and express themselves in English through songs, activities, creative props and interactive stories. Our classes are highly interactive and based on the Early Years Foundation Stage UK framework. We focus on:
a) Listening: Listening and responding to questions
b) Understanding / comprehension: Understanding and following instructions whilst building comprehension through exploring the ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘who’ etc. c) Speaking: Express thoughts clearly and focusing on pronunciation, introducing vocabulary and speech etiquette. We adopt an integrated approach to learning and incorporate auditory (through sound), visual (through sight) and kinesthetic (through movement) learning styles to make our classes effective and fun. Children are also encouraged to be creative and curious, exploring concepts through a special syllabus of stories, dancing, miming, music and creative play. For example, in our space topic for 3 year olds, we have a variety of activities to choose from. Using visuals, children can layout their galaxy whilst learning new vocabulary; sun, moon, earth, stars, asteroid, meteor etc.. They can choose their rockets, astronauts (they need to verbalise which one), do some space walking then rescue an alien. We can sing educational songs about aliens or drive our space ships, count-down to blasting off our rockets, practice some phonics and spelling and/or accompany my edited version of an orchestral piece with percussion instruments. We also discuss the songs to make sure the children understand what the song is about and children can engage is some fun creative play – zoom their rockets around space, land them on the sun, fly behind the moon etc. Younger children do less complex activities with simpler concepts i.e. birds, trees, butterflies, firetrucks but the learning principals are the same.