When I first started teaching online, I was reluctant to accept students younger than teenagers. However, as my timetable changed and I had to transfer all students online or stop lessons completely when I moved house at the end of 2014, I took on some of my regular younger students as online learners. Eek!

The process has been a really great learning curve and proved to me just how accustomed to technology little people are nowadays. We’ve got an exciting future generation growing up right there. Today, I want to share my 12 top tips for teaching children on Skype.

Tip 1 – Take advantage of emoticons

My students love using emoticons as part of the lesson. They enjoy typing and playing with emoticons, and so rather than try to fight this – work with it!

Encourage them to share emoticons that can tell a story to be translated into the target language. You can then write down the sentence or words learnt from the emoticons beneath in the Skype notes.

As well as the faces you’d expect, there’s also a dog and cat, a house, a sun and raincloud, and various useful hand gestures including a thumbs up and thumbs down. Come to think of it, the various ways to use the emoticons for language teaching could be a blog post in itself!

There’s also been lots of new animated additions lately, which are really fun.

For example:

Let’s say you’re teaching Spanish and have been working on ‘ser’ and ‘estar’. When they send you a selection of face emoticons, use them to encourage basic sentences such as ‘estoy triste’ or ‘estoy feliz’ depending on the expression on the face. You could follow this up by sending the emoticons yourself and timing students to recall the sentences for each emoticon as fast as possible.

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Tip 2 – Show and tell

The main thing I was worried about when teaching children on Skype was the lack of physical contact with teaching aids such as toys, games, and my trusty whiteboard. However, chances are, your students will always have something exciting to show or tell you about.

Again – let them! Ask them to explain in their target language. If they can’t do that yet, focus on picking out individual words or short phrases that can be easily translated from what they say.

For example:

If they show you their new teddy bear and you’ve been learning adjectives, encourage them to use the appropriate adjectives to describe the teddy. Following that you can add new adjectives to the list, think about opposites, or even find things around you at your end that could (or couldn’t!) be described using the same words.

Tip 3 – Keep parents in the loop

I find it really useful to send a list of the vocabulary, sentences, and grammar we’ve studied to the parents after each lesson. This works for a couple of reasons.

The first is that it involves the parents, therefore involving the home space and not just making their language exposure stop at the computer screen after our lesson each week.

Second, it encourages the parents to ask their children what they did, how they enjoyed it and to practise with them in between lessons.

For example:

Jot down the Skype notes (with translation if parents don’t speak the language the child is learning!) on a text message or email to send directly to parents after each lesson. Make it part of your lesson routine and that way you’ll never forget.

Tip 4 – Twiddla

I mentioned Twiddla in my previous post with general tips on teaching on Skype. However, when it comes to teaching children, it really comes into its own.

I don’t generally use the web browsing feature when teaching children, but I do use the interactive whiteboard to play games such as noughts and crosses or hangman. I also use it to play pictionary or share images for students to draw on.

For example:

If we’ve been learning about food, I ask children to draw their favourite fruit and then try and guess using whole sentences. I’m not going to lie – this can be tricky with very young children whose drawings aren’t always…life-like? Can I say that?!

Related: 12 Top Tips: How to Teach on Skype

Tip 5 – Good ol’ whiteboard

You know the classic “I heart NY” tee? I’m tempted to craft up a “I heart my whiteboard” t-shirt. I must sound obsessed.

My whiteboard is one of my essential teaching tools that never leaves my bag. However, it’s great for bringing an extra dimension to Skype lessons too.

For example:

The obvious way is that you can write words or sentences you want your student to copy into their book. The fun way is that you can write individual words or draw images and then play around with the board by moving it past the camera really fast, or slowly sweeping it from top to bottom seeing if students can identify the words. This is a great way for keeping (or retaining!) focus mid-lesson.

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Tip 6 – Get physical!

Another way to bring an extra dimension to lessons is to use actual real-life things at your end as much as possible. Prepare them before the lesson so you don’t spend half the time wandering around finding them and you’re golden!

For example:

If you’re teaching clothes, bring some different items of clothing through to the lesson – or even dress up in lots of layers! If you’re teaching food, raid your kitchen for recognisable food vocabulary before the lesson begins. There’s a lot of room for creativity here.

Tip 7 – Remember they’re young

It’s very easy to expect a lot from your students. After all, their parents are paying you to teach them, and chances are, you want something to show for that to prove that they have learnt something and haven’t just been paying more attention to picking their nose.

But don’t worry! Remember they’re young, keep parents in the loop, and accept and work with distractions.

For example:

If a student wants to tell you about his or her day at school rather than learn new French words, let them. Then, if you’ve studied school subjects previously, ask if they can remember the names for the school subjects they’ve just been talking about in French. If you haven’t previously studied it, give the student something new based on what they’ve been telling you about.

After all, language needs to be useful. Chances are, if they’re talking about something, that something is an important part of their life. So knowing how to say it in the language they’re learning will be no bad thing.

Related: How to Teach on Skype: 12 Top Tips for Online Language Teachers

Tip 8 – TL, TL, TL!

On that note, speak as much in the target language as possible. Just like when teaching groups or older students, in some lessons students’ll learn more than in others. Aim to even the field by speaking as much in the target language as possible.

This doesn’t work wonderfully with all children at first, but I’ve found generally, that the younger they are, the less likely they are to freak out about this.

If students seem nervous about this, start by getting students used to basic instructions used regularly in lessons. Then you can build this up to speaking more and more in the target language.

For example:

Let’s say that your student doesn’t seem to be understanding what you’re saying in the target language. Try not to convert to their native language straight away! Speak slower, explain what you want to say in other words, use that whiteboard again, do whatever it takes but speak in the target language as much as possible.

Tip 9 – Screenshare

Another tip from my previous Skype teaching tips post, but worthy again of a mention here. If you’re using presentations or documents to teach or explain, then sharing your screen with students is so ridiculously useful. And it’s another way to encourage engagement within the lesson. You can do this directly from within Skype by clicking ‘conversations’ on the top bar and then ‘share screen’.

For example:

Imagine your student is learning about describing appearance. Create a presentation with 6 or more faces with different features (glasses, different hair colour etc) and bring it up by screenshare on Skype. Now you can play ‘guess who’ with your student!

Ask them to pick one and then ask questions to guess which face they have picked. You can then swap and the student can guess which face you have picked. If the questions are difficult for the student to remember, put them on the same slide of the presentation.

Tip 10 – Bored? Game

There will be times when your young student’s attention is a little distracted. This is one of the most difficult things in comparison to real life teaching. To bring them back into the lesson, have a handful of games up your sleeve that require no or few resources, meaning that you can just start playing to break up the lesson and change focus as soon as you see attention fading.

For example:

Using magnetic flashcard images, noughts and crosses can be quickly set up on your whiteboard. As we’ve mentioned, this also adds another dimension, meaning students have to focus their attention on you to see the game!

Tip 11 – Send things in advance

Many resources can be used within the lesson, but it can also be useful to send things, such as videos, in advance to students. This gives the parents and students a chance to become familiar with the topic and language before the lesson.

It also saves time in the lesson, meaning that people aren’t paying for your time only to spend 5 minutes of that watching a video while you sit quietly waiting for it to finish.

For example:

I recently wanted to begin teaching a selection of opposites to a young student who I know isn’t afraid of things completely in the target language, and so sent this video before the lesson with lots of repetition of ‘dentro’ and ‘fuera’.

Tip 12 – Offer shorter lessons

On that note, it’s also beneficial to be flexible with how long lessons are for younger students. I normally offer 1 hour lessons, however for younger students, I understand (and agree!) that this can be far too long. So, I tend to suggest 30 minute lessons to students under 10 or 11, giving parents the chance to book more than one lesson a week if they would like to do so.

For example:

Don’t be afraid to go even shorter if needed! I’ve previously taught one student for 30 minutes followed by 15 minutes with his younger brother talking completely in the target language to increase maximum exposure.

So there we have it! 12 tips to help you teaching children on Skype.

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