Friday, December 29, 2023
Have you noticed, like we have at London School of Languages, that when young learners sit the Pre-A1 Starters, A1 Movers and A2 Flyers exams they generally perform less well in the reading tasks than in listening, speaking and writing? This has got us thinking about how we can better-prepare our young learners for the tasks that they will be faced with in the reading papers of the Cambridge young learner suite of exams. In this blog post, you will find some useful links to reading activities as well as a selection of activities that you can use in class to help develop the reading skills of your young learners. Read on to find out how!
Cambridge has a mountain of free resources available to help young learners to prepare for the Starters, Movers and Flyers exams. The first of these can be found under the following link: https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/learning-english/parents-and-children/activities-for-children
This is a selection of interactive activities for young learners, which focus on the skills and language required for the young learner suite of exams. These activities can be used as warmers or as a way of reviewing language that you have previously studied in class. They are also a great way to finish a lesson with a fun activity or to be set as homework. If you do set these activities for homework, just make sure that everyone in your class has access to an electronic device such as a phone or tablet and that they have permission to use it from their parents.
Another fantastic resource from Cambridge is the ‘World of Fun’ resource centre, which you can find at https://worldoffun.cambridge.org/resources. On this website, you can find a variety of worksheets and other resources that you can use to develop your young learners’ reading skills. Our favourite resources from this page are the character worksheets with characters that have been designed by children around the world. These worksheets are ready to use and require little to no preparation and even come with the answers! The page also has lots of other great worksheets for each level, so be sure to check them out too. Other great resources on this page are the flashcards and posters which you can use to create games and decorate your classroom.
A final resource from Cambridge that we really love is the wordlist picture book. There is one for each level and you can find them using the following links:
https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/images/245852-yle-flyers-word-list-picture-book.pdf
https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/images/396159-yle-movers-word-list-picture-book-2018.pdf
https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/images/starters-word-list-picture-book.pdf
Knowing the vocabulary from the word lists is a key part of doing well in the Cambridge young learner exams and these picture books really bring the vocabulary to life. You can use the images to decorate your room or to create activities and games that your young learners will love.
Make your own flashcards – As we mentioned earlier, vocabulary is a key element of the young learner reading exams. A fun activity you can do to help with this is create your own flashcards in class. This can be a regular activity every time you start a new unit in the book and the students can build up their own set of flashcards which you can keep in your classroom. Then, whenever you want to revise the vocabulary from the exam you can play matching games or other activities with the flashcards. Your students will be motivated to do these activities because they are using the flashcards that they created themselves.
Extend the reading task – Many reading tasks contain lots of useful language that is not explicitly used to successfully complete the activity. Often with exam tasks we go through the answers, clarifying any areas of uncertainty and then move on. But there is so much more to exploit in these reading texts. We can create other vocabulary matching tasks based around the language that is not tested in the original activity. Alternatively, the students can make gap fill activities for their classmates by removing words whose meanings they already know. Whatever you do, try to make the most of the reading activities in the practice exams and use them for more than just completing the exam tasks correctly.
Make reading activities physical – A very simple way of livening up a reading activity is to make it into a physical activity in which students move around the room. A quick and easy one is to divide the class into teams and give each team a true and false card. You then read out or write statements about the reading text and in their groups, the students decide if the statement is true or false. Once they have decided they raise the appropriate card. The team with the most correct answers wins. You can make this game even more physical by having true and false parts of the classroom which the students have to run to once they have chosen an answer. This could also be extended to A, B, C, D questions, with each corner of the room representing an answer.
Gap-fill reading race – Another physical activity here. Here you need a gap fill reading task blown up to A3 (you will need one copy for each team) and then you can stick these tasks on the board. At the back of the room, you have the words needed to fill the gaps, plus a couple of words that aren’t needed. Again, you’ll need one set per team. The teams then race to put the words into the right place in the text. When students have finished, the teacher indicates how many answers are correct, with students having to change any incorrect answers. The winning team is the first one to complete the text correctly. This is a really fun way of bringing a typically dull reading text to life.
Gamification - A final quick activity is to create a tic-tac-toe/noughts and crosses board with each of the 9 squares containing a reading question. In this task, students not only have to answer the reading question, but also choose strategically which question to answer next to prevent the other team from winning.
We hope this blog post gives you some ideas for how to help your students to improve their reading skills at Starters, Movers and Flyers levels and have some fun in your classroom at the same time. Enjoy trying them out, and good luck to your students in the exams!
