Classroom Management for ESL Preschool

A preschool class is hard to control. An ESL preschool class is even more so as your fresh faced students don't understand a single word coming out of your mouth. As a teacher at the start of a new school year you need to introduce your classroom commands. They need to be simple, few and have corresponding actions that naturally show the meaning of what you are saying.

Below are my ideas on commands to have, actions to use and why.

My rules are: Sit down, stand up, cross your legs, line up, go to (color line) and if the class is picking them up relatively easily listen(be quiet).

Each rule/command has an associated action: 

• Sit down, I push my palms down. 
• Stand up, I raise my palms up. 
• Cross your legs I first do it myself as well as crossing my fingers. Later I'll only cross my fingers as I say the command. 
• Line up, I slap my hands together in front of me. 
• Go to (color line), I point at the line I want. They don't know colors yet either, remember. 
• Listen, I put my finger to my mouth and then my hand to my ear.

All of the actions are natural. They could be understood with no words associated with them. This is what ESl Preschool needs. We need to make everything easy to understand. The actions help teach the words and are a reminder what we mean.

The most important part of teaching all of this is that you teach it in a fun game. We're not teaching these rules/commands to be mean. We're teaching them so that we have control of the class. That we can teach to the best of our ability and most importantly to stop anybody from getting hurt. 

In another post I'll discuss reward and punishment systems.

NOTEs: 

1: Keep your commands/rules to a minimum.

2: Have a corresponding action

3: Make it fun to learn them. Competitive race type games work great!