Younger children welcome contact with a new language with great enthusiasm and curiosity, especially if they are immersed in a stimulating and effective learning environment. With adequate training, the adult can become an expert in preschool language education, both in the processes that facilitate the child’s development of the mother tongue, and in the discovery of other languages ​​or expressive codes, verbal and non-verbal, available.

Little English explorers is a self-training tool, full of theoretical and methodological ideas and operational materials to prepare activities for children and offer a practical path: games, workshops and useful tools to develop a full awareness of one’s own skills.

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The structure of the book

Little English explorers is composed of three sections.

KNOWING AND REFLECTING:
reflection tools to stimulate the reader to reflect on his/her experience as a language learner, his/her convictions and skills. It offers useful answers, based on scientific research, to the questions that many parents and educators ask themselves about language learning at an early age.

PLAN AND ACT:
10 winning moves to effectively propose a foreign language to preschool children. This section offers operational tools to help put the plan into action, e.g. project material, child observation sheets, parent questionnaires, etc.

EXPERIMENT:
8 Learning Units designed to introduce the English language in the main moments of the day in kindergarten:

• Arriving at the nursery
• Circle time
• Let’s wash our hands. It’s time to eat!
• It’s garden time!
• Behave yourselves!
• Story time
• Let’s take care of our planet
• Nora leaves the nursery

The Adventures of Nora and Pip – the illustrated story

The book is accompanied by an illustrated book with the stories of the nice characters Nora and Pip. It is structured with:

Explanatory videos on how to conduct storytelling activities with children

Pages for adults, which contain the texts of the story in English

Large illustrated boards to show to children

The book comes with various online resources which are useful for the teacher:

• a Vocabulary notebook in which to collect the words and phrases that you will encounter in the texts and that you did not know, so that you can reuse them;
• additional cards to those already present in the photocopiable pages;
• survey chart examples, routine charts and sorting charts;
• other materials to be printed;
• the audio of the dialogues (to be accessed with the corresponding QRcode);
• the videos with the narration of the stories (to be accessed with the corresponding QRcode).

Leaf through some selected pages from the book that have been translated into English to facilitate your evaluation:

The “Experiment with Languages” series
The new series “Experiment with languages: Resources for innovative and inclusive language education”  offers operational resources for teachers to plan and implement innovative language education experiences in their own educational realities.

THE AUTHORS

Michele Daloiso: Associate Professor of Didactics of Modern Languages ​​at the University of Parma, he directs the research group ELICom (Inclusive language education and communication). He has numerous publications to his credit on teaching languages ​​to pupils with special needs, including the monograph “Supporting Learners with Dyslexia in the ELT Classroom” (Oxford University Press, 2017), winner of the Ben Warren Trust Prize of the International House and finalist at the ELTons Innovation Awards promoted by the British Council.

Luciana Favaro: PhD in Language Sciences, she is currently a Subject Expert at the Ca ‘Foscari University of Venice. Her scientific interests and her activity as a trainer regard the approach to languages at an early age, the language education of students with specific linguistic needs and the use of technology in the teaching of foreign languages.