Mark's Notes:

• I introduce noun groups here with young children to get them to start grouping similar words together.  This will help when we get into more difficult patterns and some sentence formation explanations.  Noun groups are easiest for young learners.  In the next unit will get them to separate nouns from other groups like adjectives and verbs.

Phase 1:  Phase 1 is always vocabulary focused.  Again, it's important to solidify the vocabulary before you move on to anything else.  If you teach it well the first time, you won't need to teach it again.

Verbs 2 contains some verbs with obligatory direct objects, so we are getting a little longer with our predicates here.  Verbs 1 set from unit 3 was simply composed of single word actions.  For more discussion on teaching verbs in the beginning, see unit 3.

Classroom is a useful set of noun vocabulary that I introduce here to increase vocabulary and give us time to practice our verbs and questions.  This set has a trouble word, "scissors".  So far we haven't worked with singular or plural and since it's an irregular plural of sorts, I ignore that it's plural as far as explaining it to children or correcting them if they say *"This is a scissors." for example.  That's up to you, the teacher.  (We'll start work with plurals in Unit 7.)

Prepositions give my students a very hard time so I spend a lot of time on these.  For practice I use real objects, starting with a box and stuffed animal that fits inside that box.  I move the animal around first telling them just the preposition "in", "on" ... After they know the words, I add the location, "in the box".  Slowly over the next few lessons, I change the objects, changing just one at a time.  The next lesson I might use a toy car instead of a stuffed animal for instance, or a cup instead of the box.

Family is pretty straight forward.  It's good to be able to talk about your family, but for phase one we just focus on the vocabulary.  There is a "draw your own family" worksheet and I use this for students to practice the questions "Who is he/she?" and answer "He's my father."  Family as a topic can be a little touchy in some classes and with certain children, use your best judgment whether it's best to talk specifically about the children's family or better to use some character set like the Simpsons, Flinstones, etc.

Phonics: I'm still working with consonant blends here.  There are some online practice games from Fun Fonix you can use with your students as well.

Phase 2: I'll come back to phase 2 and phase 3 once I get all of phase 1 posted.

Phase 3: I'll come back to phase 2 and phase 3 once I get all of phase 1 posted.

If you'd like to listen to the the curriculum explained, I discussed the curriculum and how it runs on ESL Teacher Talk.com: