How long can you pay attention for? Will you make it to the end of this blog post before you get distracted? You’re an adult, so it should be easy. But what if you were four years old? How long could you focus for?
Young children have short attention spans. If you’re teaching very young learners (three, for and five-year olds) it’s very unlikely then can pay attention for more than five minutes. So what can you do to keep them engaged for an hour long class?
I like to divide my classroom into “zones”. Every five or ten minutes we move to a new zone and a new activity. Using these different zones has three big advantages. It refocuses the students every time they move. Students get to ‘move’ by changing seats instead of fidgeting in their seats. Finally, lesson stages become more memorable: they no longer blend into one long and boring activity.
Here are the zones I use:
1. The chair zone. The students’ chairs are in a semi-circle with the teacher sitting at the center. Your chair zone is probably in the middle of the classroom. I turn my semi-circle into a “V” shape and move it into the corner of the classroom. This gives me more space to create the other zones, such as…
2. The song zone. This is a wall. Whenever we sing a song, the students stand with their backs against the wall, facing me. I can see all the students; they can see me.
3. The “TV” zone. This is an area on the floor in front of the whiteboard/TV/interactive whiteboard. Students move here (one by one) when we play Pictionary, watch a short cartoon, or when I demonstrate written work on the board.
4. The story zone. This is a circular mat in another area of the classroom. We sit here when we read a story together.
5. The book-work zone. My classroom isn’t big enough for a permanent table space, so I move tables into the center of the classroom and ask students (one-by-one) to move their chairs to the table. This is where any crafts and book work happen.
Now that we have five zones in the classroom, we can plan which activities will be done in which zone. A typical class might start with a “saying hi and how are you” routine (chair zone), followed by a “hello song” (song zone), then checking vocabulary on flashcards (chair zone again), playing Pictionary as students draw the new words (TV zone), reading a story together which is about the topic of today’s class (story zone), etc. before some matching in coursebook (book-work zone). Each stage happens at a different zone, and each stage lasts not much more than five minutes.
Did you make it to the end without looking away? If you did, I’m glad. I spent several hours writing and editing this post with the aim of keeping your attention. With your students there’s an easier way: zones.