Children needs

Running Head: CHILDREN NEEDS

Children Needs in the Primary School
Laura Alejandra Cristancho Correa
Surcolombiana University

CHILDREN NEEDS IN THE PRIMARY SCHOOL
The first thought when you are in front of a class is: what am I doing? Everything that you learn and discuss in the career was perfectly fine until that moment, when you realize that you are in big troubles, especially ifyou are in front of kids that have that face of revenge that you don’t want to see.
There is where the headache and the pain start. Okay, I’m being a little overreacting, but, what is the strategy to have a significant contact with children without been rude and mistreat them?
It is quite a talent to be a teacher and of course to encourage little kids to learn a foreign languagelike English, but the key is: Needs, not yours, their needs in the classroom and how you can take advantage of them to involve the teaching with fun, and not also the fact that children are there to learn waiting for your insights and ideas, no, the first task that we have to do as teachers is to identify skills and characteristics of the students that help us to reach the goal of having a balancedenvironment and good comprehension of the topic that you are going to teach.
According to Sussan Halliwell (1992) in her book: Teaching English in the Primary School said that: “young children do not come to the language classroom empty-handed. They bring with them an already well-established set of instincts, skills and characteristics which will help them to learn another language.”Beginning with the idea of taking into account the needs of the kids, they have a huge imagination and use it when they are acquiring a new language, and their instintic of physical and verbal interaction gave them more energy to ask, talk and play in any moment of the class.
To have a good understanding of our situation and children’s situation, it is necessary to go deep inside thestatement I mentioned before. Children learn in many ways, not only speaking to them, they learn through symbols and sings that the teacher do in the class or when explain something. They can understand meanings of words just paying attention to the intonation, facial expressions and teacher’s body language. They use an essential part of the communication, general understanding of a topic whenthey need it.
Another important issue to have in mind and very important too, is that they have a lot of imagination. It is true that the role of the teacher is to guide them in the use of real language, but you cannot fight against the stream, being a child is being creative and fantasy with the things in the environment. Language teaching should be concerned with real life. But it would be agreat pity if we were so concerned to promote reality in the classroom what includes imagination and fantasy. The act of fantasizing, of imagining, is very much an authentic part of being a child. (Susan Halliwell, 1992). Teacher can use their imagination to promote the use of language and communication between them. For example when they talk about monsters, children can describe them usingcolors, physical characteristics and numbers in the case of how old is it?
Children like talking, and here we have another skill that takes a huge role in the learning process. Teacher should give the students confidence to use the language and be related with the classroom in order that kids express their ideas and share opinions among their classmates and interact in a spoken way the use ofdifferent words and meanings.
Games and fun tasks develop and provide the use of language in a real situation; children are focus on playing the game, and not in the correct use of the words. So, games are great opportunities to learn in an indirect way. And this may be one of the reasons of why kids love games, because they are immerse in their world; the world in which everything is fun...