Teaching ESL to a very active child
 

Hi everyone! And thank you for such a great forum with lots of very interesting ideas, especially for the ones who are just beginning to teach.

I have a question about teaching ESL to a 5-year old kid who is very active and pretty spoiled (although he seems smart). I was asked to be a private tutor for him and I’ve never taught English to such little ones before. I did work in pre-K for a while, but kids were in a classroom setting and they knew that they are at school and have to behave well. In this case the boy is at home and he can just start running and jumping and speaking only his native language (Russian) at any time. His attention span is very short, and although we had only one lesson yet – I’m afraid I might not be able to handle this without some advice from more experienced teachers. It’s his parents who want him to learn English – not him, so he doesn’t seem to do any effort in trying to be a good student and he has everything (so stickers, nice flash cards and colourful books are not very interesting to him). If someone had any experience or ideas – I’d be very grateful. This is a very challenging experience for me.

Re: Teaching ESL to a very active child
 

As a general introduction you might want to look at this post on Young Learners with some basic ideas.

But speaking generally, you need to plan LOADS of very short activities of just a few minutes each which you can switch around and play with in class. (You can always come back to them after a while, of course.) Also think about the kind of things he's interested in and focus on those; not teaching English per se but talking and working on stuff he's interested in but it just so happens you do it in English.

Re: Teaching ESL to a very active child
 

It seems that this is a difficult situation you are in. Just do your best in teaching him. For instance you can connect something that he likes. Let say,music. Relate music to your lesson.

Re: Teaching ESL to a very active child
 

I agree with the above suggestion. Try to find something he likes and use that as much as possible in class. Maybe his favorite TV show, cartoon, football player or whatever!