English for Children

In home education and unschooling, children's interests and personal skills are at the centre of any learning curriculum or lesson plan. Each activity, topic or subject is declined to fit a child's uniqueness. In this blog, I share with you some fun English activities you can propose to your child according to his/her learning style. You'll see the article is aimed at parents who are struggling to help their child learning at home. But I think it can be very interesting for homeschooling familie…

You desperately want your children to learn English, but every time you suggest they do a course, the answer is NO, and it’s impossible to change their minds. That’s probably because your children have no idea of what you are talking about. When you tell them that they have to learn English, they start imagining long lessons and never-ending grammar exercises. Maybe they’re a little shy, perfectionists or scared by the potential difficulties. They might have visions of a strict teacher correctin…

(German and English Version below)

Ci è sempre stato detto: "Impara l'inglese in modo da poterlo usare per viaggiare!" E tra un esercizio di grammatica e l'altro, ci siamo immaginati a chiedere indicazioni in una grande città straniera, ordinare piatti esotici in un ristorante o lamentarci in perfetto inglese con una receptionist d'albergo scontrosa.

Ma, cosa succederebbe se ti dicessi: "Ti piacerebbe viaggiare attraverso l'inglese?"

Come ti fa sentire questa idea? Non sembra più magico essere in…

You feel what they do at school is not enough. You realised the course you had chosen with a mother tongue teacher wasn't as effective as you expected. English is everywhere, in arts, games, shows, cinema or tv, and you don't want your children to experience the frustration of not understanding and of not being good enough. When it comes to English learning, you feel your children are constantly missing out.  

 But what kind of courses are good enough? Who can you trust to teach English to your…

I don’t know about you, but to me, writing in English started at school with never-ending dications of a word after another. Luckily, there are tons of much funnier ways to get your children to practise writing.  The game Name it from my ebook "Three ESL Games for Homeschooling Families" is an example of how you can gamify writing in your homeschool lesson with a creative twist.

But let’s have a closer look at what writing means when we teach English to our children. Well, it depends on the lev…

When you build your English as a second language curriculum, you need to include listening activities. Listening is a key skill in language learning. The sooner children get used to it, the better.

Fortunately, it is not difficult to find listening exercises online. Still, one should be careful to select the right activity for his/her child that should fit both level and interest. (Who wants to listen to something we are not interested in? This is not a school. Homeschoolers can personalise th…

If you learnt English as a second language at school in the early 2000s, it is highly possible you know that there is nothing more confidence-killing than a teacher shouting at you or, worse, laughing at you when you make mistakes while trying to speak a second language. And what about grades? Teachers constantly monitored what we were doing wrong and not on what we achieved, improved or did better.

We don’t want this to happen to our children. We don’t want them to spend several years, from hi…

As a homeschool mum, you know that education isn’t only about rote learning and memory work. Our generation has learnt the hardest way how important it is to be ready for the real world outside books, and this is something that schools most of the time fails to deliver. In most schools learning means sitting still, listening to the teacher and memorize what he/she says without putting into doubt whether what is said is true or false. 

In this way, school forgets to teach soft skills: critical t…

A friend asked me: "Do you think it's wise that your children are learning English with an Italian teacher instead of a native teacher - because of accent and such?"

And I had to take a moment to think about the question before answering.

When we signed up for Noemi's English courses, this question had not even entered my mind.

(By the way, you can find the course of the friend that I am talking about here: "The English Hive" by Noemi Bessone)

My criteria for signing up have been:

• the c…

In online learning, parents are the key to learners’ success. A good teacher knows that parents’ expectations are important to deliver an effective course. It’s usually the teacher’s job to support children’s learning. With online courses, parents take over and have to be aware of their new role of providing supervision, motivation, feedback and help without being distracting or too intrusive.  It may seem quite challenging, but it is perfectly manageable once you have been let into the followin…