KISS Goodbye To Complicated Lessons!

A few years ago, I listened to a course by a communication skills expert, and one of the principles I remembered about writing was the KISS principle. In case you haven’t heard of it before, KISS stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid!”

Over the course of my, now, many years of teaching languages to classes of young children, I have often had to remind myself of the same principle with regard to lesson preparation. As an ethustastic novice, I would go all out making complicated activities and games, and they would often end in confusion, and not just on the part of the children, so now I’ve KISSed all that goodbye, and I plan my lessons according to simplicity.

A KISS lesson could simply include: (1) Presentation of language, (2) Practice of language through game or activity and (3) Summation.

Further ideas:

(A) Choose a clear learning goal for the lesson, such as 8 words, and a question and reply that uses those words. For example, 8 sports and ‘I like ___?’/’What sport do you like?’ It's easy to learn, easy to teach and focussed. What could be better?

B) Include games and activities in your classes by all means, but make them easy to understand, and easy to carry out. Adapt a simple card game that the pupils already know how to play, like ‘Old Maid’ or ‘Uno’, and you’ve got yourself a prime activity for language practice.

Explain the activity in English. It may be tempting to explain the activity in the foreign tongue, if you speak it fluently, but all you are doing is confusing the pupils, because they won’t really understand any of what you are saying. Immersive learning such as this only works when pupils are exposed to several hours of the language per day, and only then, when they are very young. The aim of the activity is, after all, to practise the language you are teaching in the lesson, so keep that as your primary aim.

(C) You don’t need an awful lot of resources to deliver a highly effective language lesson. I use flash-cards, specially made playing cards and a couple of toys now and again – that’s it! In fact, all I really need is a set of flash-cards, and I don’t even need those if you give me a stick of chalk and a board to draw on!

That’s not to say that interactive white-boards and the such like shoudn’t be used. If you have the skills and the inclination, you could create some very nice language presentations. But think about it: is your presentation via IWB ultimately any more effective than picture cards, and is it really worth the extra effort and preparation? In the end, it’s a matter of personal taste, but I find flash-cards so much more interactive and hands-on, they’ll be number 1 in my teaching arsenal for a long time to come!

If I sit down to prepare a lesson these days, I often write KISS at the top of the page, to put myself in the right mindset to create a suitable lesson plan.