Pre-kids activities

Working with kids under six years old might be more difficult than working with older young learners. 

Pre-kids are between four and five years old. Those children are old enough to walk and talk, but they are not ready to go to school. Their abilities are limited, as most of them cannot write or read.

ACTIVITIES

Coloring is always a good option with pre-kids, as long as the activity is connected with a relevant topic of the class. Coloring might be useful to practice vocabulary (colors, body parts, animals, places of the city, objects, parts of the house, etc.) or to connect our students with some cultural aspects (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, San Valentine’s day, etc)

Some useful worksheets: 

1. Coloring numbers:

-Ask your students to think about the color that each number would be: "If number one were a color what color would it be?" 

- After coloring each number, ask your students to walk around the classroom searching for people with the same number and color. 

- At the end they will know who is the partner they have more things in common with. The teacher can write some couples or groups that had some numbers with the same color in common. 

NOTE: To make sure that any of your students will be alone at the end, you can ask them to take out the number of colors of the numbers they have. Here we have numbers from zero to five (six numbers) so they will take out six colors. 

2. Color and answer: 

Here, our children will practice vocabulary (animals and numbers) and they will also practice their skills counting. 

- Ask your students to color the image. 

- On the board, the teacher writes the number and the transcription of it in words.  EXAMPLE: 1=one, 2=two, 3=three... 

- Bring some toys or different objects to the classroom to help your students counting and to practice before answering. Students must repeat each time the teacher says a number. 

- Leave your students answer the worksheet alone, then correct with everybody. 

 Some other worksheets "color and answer" 

3. I like.../I don't like... 

Some worksheets contain only the vocabulary that you need. Isolated words are not very useful to improve their language learning process. Teachers must connect the new vocabulary with some easy and practical phrases. 

- Ask children to color the images. 

- Repeat with your students the names of the animals (objects, parts of the body, colors or any other vocabulary you have) 

- Bring some extra images to paste then on the board face down, each student will go to the board and take one of the images, they have five second to tell the name of the animal. 

SOME BOARD GAMES: (Extra-material)

- Sometimes, teachers have some minutes more and no plan to develop. These activities are funny and take long time. Students will be relaxed and they love to complete these kind of activities.

4. Listening and repeating 

Most of the times we think that pre-kids are not ready for "difficult" activities as the ones that involve listening or speaking skills development.

Kids have the ability to repeat what they hear, so you can present some videos for them to repeat and learn.

- They can learn the alphabet with a song.

- You can add some movements. EXAMPLE: Stand up if you hear a vowel. Shake your hands if you hear a consonant.

Alphabet song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAlX1V3lK5s&t=38s

BINGO 

- You can practice the alphabet with this classic song 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mmF8zOlh_g

Farm animals: 

- Teacher can play a mime game with the students by producing the sounds of each animal.

   - Each student will come to the front.

   - The teacher will show the name of drawing of the animal to the student and he/she has to produce the sound that the animal does. 

   - The rest of the class will guess the animal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXEq-QO3xTg

Old MacDonald had a farm 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oYKonYBujg