Bringing creative teaching into the young learner classroom' enables teachers to implement a child-centred approach through activities which can be personalized to the needs of the learners aged 6-12. There is a 'Try this' feature which contains 150 classroom activities. 'Why this works' feature gives a brief explanation of the theory behind the activity ideas. It also includes sections on assessment, how to get the most out of your coursebook, and motivating children to learn.
This is best described as an exceptionally good teacher's resource book. In 28 chapters there are several dozen excellent teaching ideas for 5-12 year-olds grouped into nine sections. Each chapter and section has a descriptive title that actually makes sense, e.g. Chapter 7: 'Healthy competition'. (This is harder to achieve than one might think.) Each chapter ends with a well-founded statement of rationale. The parts are: Knowing and challenging your learners; Encouraging your students to learn; Going beyond the coursebook; Empowering your learners; Assessment; Playing with the sounds of English; Bringing the real world into the classroom; Using make believe, performance, and metaphor; For the teacher: Language and cultural contexts. All the activities encourage the use of spoken English by the teacher (e.g., not a dvd): in the short but informative introduction, the authors say why. This looks like a really good book. * The Teacher Trainer Journal, Vol 29/3 * 'This is an excellent book for less experienced teachers of young learners.' * Humanising Language Teaching Magazine for teachers and teacher trainers * '...non-native speaker teachers can find useful strategies to develop their proficiency in the target language, native-speaker teachers can pick up ideas on how to understand, ...and the new cultural context where they are to teach.' * Modern English Teacher - Volume 21/4 *