How to Teach English to Kids Using Songs

Video Transcript

"A wonderful tool that early childhood educators can use when teaching English to children reinforcing skills is the use of songs. The best way to use songs with kiddos is to remember to be repetitive. Practice them often. Present them to the children first. Allow them to sing it along with you, and then do it all the time. For example, you might want to sing the same songs when you are at carpet time in the morning. You might want to sing the same song every time you clean up. You may want to sing the song every time that you line up to use the restroom. Use these songs repeatedly so that children are able to understand and remember thee lyrics. Some examples of songs that you may use would include number songs, and that can be numbers counting up or numbers counting down such as "Ten Monkeys Jumping on the Bed." One of my favorite songs is that I have with my children is we count backwards from five and we call it "Five Green and Speckled Frogs." I'll sing it real quick for you. "Five green and speckled frogs sat on a speckled log eating the most delicious bugs, yum, yum. One jumped into the pool where it was nice and cool, now there are four green speckled frogs, glub, glub." And then we'll count from four all the way down to zero and it really reinforces the skill of counting backwards from five down. "Ten Silly Monkeys Jumping on the Bed," we'll also practice from ten down. We have songs to practice nearly everything in my classroom. One of my favorites is a song that I've taught the children to remember the days of the week, and if you're familiar with the tunes to "the Adams Family" it goes in terms with this, and it goes "days of the week, days of the week, days of the week, days of the week, days of the week. There's Sunday, and there's Monday...there's Tuesday and there's Wednesday, Thursday and then there's Friday and then there's Saturday. Days of the week." The children love it. If they're not able to snap, which many young children aren't. Most of my children will clap along with this, but it's a song they become excited about and they're able to remember. So please get creative in songs, do your research, find some nursery songs such as "Mary Wore Her Read Dress" or "Down By the Bay." Find some great songs and get creative and have some fun at carpet time."