My windup
Preparing the lesson plan I concentrate on aims and goals I want to achieve, then choose the Method, but what is the most important in my opinion is that in age of 8 I can not teach any Grammar, because of fact that children do not learn it even in L1. This is what leaded me step by step through this project. Being realistic about children abilities and motivation I realized that all lesson should be one big 'drilling' but only with using many different ways, especially those engaged senses and games connected with the topic.
This is the main reason why I use some elements of Audio-Lingualism where the priority is given to speech and structure drills are a common feature but I believe that students can response to authentic situation, because they can not be teach without realistic context. I can not teach abstracts or patterns not showing how to use them in usual, day-to-day situations. That why I want students to speak about favorites fruits, show that they can have different tastes and teach tolerance. I can not forget that teaching means also learning social situations, develop and grow in group of peers. I appreciate group work but I know how hard it is even in age of 10. By connecting the puzzles and making one big picture of them I want children to think as a group and defeat the barrier of children's young egoism.
Because of fact that the best method for teaching children in my opinion is TBLT, I concentrated on types of tasks appropriate for this system. Students use puzzles for teaching about fruits and vitamins, has to classify them with a concrete color and have many have-and-do activities. They start lesson with song, which enforce their movements and speaking, also have to guess what are we going to speak about, guess the names of fruits and make the list of them. They prepare the list of words, which they unconsciously repeat for whole lesson, of course without realizing my goals, which are drilling tasks. I believe that in age of 8 main teaching is realized by games, which are the simplest way to remember words by all students, also those with linguistic problems. They test their knowledge, especially by the exercise with dividing fruits into two groups: Poland and world. I tried to tap children's curiosity by guessing the names of fruits and creativity in mind-map which is also characteristic for the Lexical Approach. Collaboration is my main aim.
The main problem in learning YL is to teach spelling and reading. I believe that looking at word many times, and many repetition by writing it made some kind of 'physical habit' (you do not remember how the word is written until you start to write it although your hand know it perfectly). In my lesson plan I use crosswords and word searching because it is the way of simple reading and repeating the spelling. In fact children enjoy this kinds of exercises. There is one more thing I want to take into consideration and this is the time I want to spend on the tasks. I decided to make many activities at the lesson but 3 of them in 45 minutes of lesson will be surely enough because I know in practice that sometimes one might be made in 20 minutes! It is a fact, because children has problems with concentration, they have share their thoughts and still asks teacher are they doing everything correctly so I think that making even 3 things is a success. Of course I am prepared for the situation when I have genius students and they do everything on time and we can do even more. As you can see my main problems concentrate on the abilities of students, connected with the psychological, social and physical progress not with the method. I tried to choose those kind of tasks which may be graduate by the dependence of child abilities. The base of whole lesson should be children's motivation because I believe that they should learn not only the willingness for task but also (by the psychological process of generalization) the willingness for learning English. Teaching it them in childhood will come to fruition in adulthood.