Help with students 6-9 years old
 

What games should i apply in my class to teach them simple future?
What book or where do you recommend me to find good material for children at age 8?

Thank you so much !

Re: Help with students 6-9 years old
 

Hello there,

Teach this tense with vocabulary the children already know so that not all elements in the lesson are new. That way kids can focus fully on the new verb tense rather than new words.

Explain that the lesson is on the future tense and check kids know what that means.

Then you could do a listening game where you introduce the tense. A game like "Jump the Line" (from my book 176 English Language Games for Children) is easy to use.

Draw a line down the board and draw a tennis racket, a football and a swimming pool on the left. On the right draw a rugby ball, a horse and a baseball bat. Change those for sports of your choosing if not appropriate.

Say "tomorrow I'll play baseball" and demonstrate that kids jump to the right. "Tomorrow I'll play tennis." Kids jump to the left. Go faster and faster, with the kids jumping to the correct side. Switch back and forth and try to catch them out on the wrong side.

Swap the sports vocab for food if you prefer and use "tonight I'll eat pasta, tonight I'll eat eggs, etc".

Now you have introduced the sound of the tense in short sentences show a picture if the tennis racket and say "Tomorrow I will play tennis". Pass the picture to a child. Demonstrate that this child must say the sentence Tomorrow I will play tennis" and pass the picture to his or her neighbour. The neighbour takes the card, says the sentence and passes it on.

Get that card going around and while it is on the way feed in another picture: "Tomorrow I will go swimming". Feed in more and more cards. When you clap everyone stops. You say "Tomorrow I will go swimming". Anyone with a swimming picture has to do a forfeit such as five pressups or star jumps, or pretend to be a chicken, do a funny dance or any forfeit that suits the age of your pupils.

Well those are two drill games, one for listening and one for speaking. The repetition in these games will get that tense structure well into the brains of the kids.

After that you can do some reading and writing with worksheets or passages from your textbook.

Do a quiz where kids change sentences from the tense they are in to the future tense.

If you want to get my games book it's on Amazon as a paperback, also as Kindle, and in PDF from my site.

Let me know how the games go.
All the best
Shelley Ann Vernon
Teaching English Games