English teaching pre-made curriculum

September 7, 2010 6:22 PM

Curriculum recommendations for teaching English (ESL kids, ages 3-5, 6-7, and 10-11)

I'm teaching 3 english classes to groups of five/six ESL students each: Group one is 3-5 years old, group 2 is 6-7 years old, and group 3 is 10-11 years old. I would rather spend less time designing lessons for them every week and would like to get some pre-done curriculum plans and do them. Any suggestions on where to find such things?

I've seen some recommendations on various home-schooling curricula and books:
Adventures in Phonics
Noah Webster's Reading Handbook
First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind
The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons

Any comments on these? Any recommendations for other sources?

posted by sdis to Education (4 answers total)

You really need a book that features games, games and more games, especially for the 3-5 group, and even the 6-7 group. The 10-11 group will need games, too. Total Physical Response is the only way to go.
posted by KokuRyu at 6:28 PM on September 7, 2010

You can find lessons all over the internet, but the challenge of finding a full curriculum is going to be tougher, unless you don't mind paying for it.

This thread offers some good suggestions. I don't know what kind of budget you have, but you can always call publishers and ask for samples to be sent to you.
posted by NoraCharles at 6:40 PM on September 7, 2010

Response by poster: I'm OK with paying for it, provided it's not hundreds of dollars. Figure I'm getting paid ~150/week for these three classes (1 hour each, once per week) and I'm spending 2-3 hours each weekend doing lesson planning. If I can reduce lesson planning down to 1 hour or less, I'm saving quite a bit of time/money.
posted by sdis at 6:45 PM on September 7, 2010

One fairly easy way would be to find a good ESL bookshop and look for some structured coursebooks suitable for your target age groups. Use those as the basis for your syllabus. If you've never done curriculum design before, it'll be a bit daunting, but any experienced teacher should be able to figure it out given a little time.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 11:59 AM on September 19, 2010