You can make a lesson varied by doing lots of activities on different topics. If that is what we mean by variation then we may produce a lesson which, say, begins with five minutes of greetings then revises numbers. Does a quick introduction of colours and finishes off by singing a song about the days of the week. This is patently not a helpful form of variation. The children’s minds are being required to jump from one topic to the next with little time to let things sink in or rehearse things effectively through meaningful use. So what has gone wrong? The answer is probably that the teacher is trying to compensate for the fact that many of our learners seem to have a horribly short concentration span. Sometimes, too, the problem is that the teacher feels that the fact that the children cannot yet write much in English means that the whole lesson should be oral work, and therefore feels that the only way to introduce variety is to alter the topic of the oral work. There are three things to note here.
- We won’t help the children to develop their capacity to concentrate if we jump inconsequentially from one topic to the next.
- There are ways of varying the oral work so that it is making different demands on the children and therefore feels different even when the topic remains the same.
- Even if a group of children cannot write English or if your syllabus suggests they should not write English in the early stages, there are other kinds of pencil and paper work they can do.
So, variation does not mean we have to keep changing the topic. Instead, we can keep to the same topic and materials and change the work we do. If , at the same time , we keep an eye on the stir/settle and involvement factors, then it is perfectly possible to devise a varied lesson on as little as five words for as long as an hour. You are not very likely to want to do this but it makes the point. So, here is an example of an hour’s varied lesson for beginners. It is based on just five colours and the activities it uses are each very unpretentious but together make for a satisfying lesson. (Please note that this and any other activity written out in detail in this book is not intended as an example of how it should be done but how it could be done.)