Materials

Material are one of the most important preparatives to each lesson. The importance of them is that they can be use to motivate student, and keep them active and focus on what they are asked to do.

While preparing materials, there are some aspects we need to take into consideration, specially if we are dealing with children. This aspects are:  

• Materials.
• Color.
• Size.
• Creativity.

When I talk about materials and creativity, its because we can create our own material with some recycling thing we have at home, such as: plastic bottles, cans, socks, wood, cartoon, etc. Hence, at the end they are cheaper, they are unique and catchy for our students.

The size of the material should depend on what we are going to use, but they need to be big enough so student wont force their eyes to see what is in there, and as a teacher says “ The bigger, the best”. And that is why, color take an importan role, because the more colorful they are the better is for the children.

Some material we can create and adapt them to our own teaching are:

• Flashcards

• Modeling clay.

• Puppets.

• Music Instruments.

• Spinning wheel.

• Flip card.

Beside materials is important to considerate some grouping techniques because this is one way to give the opportunity to improve their cooperative learning. There are many techniques that we can apply, as a random technique or  we can adapt our lesson and incorporate it in a way to group our students, for example: if we are teaching colors, we can have a box that will contain different color papers and students will have to take one, and look for the partner that have the same color. Or we can divide an image into two parts and they will have to look for the partner that complete the image.

The importance of having catchy and unique materials is that it will motivate students, and keep them active, focus and interested on what they are asked to do.