Learning Simple Sentences

Village kids pick up words more easily than I thought, but learning to speak correct sentences is a challenge even for the smarter ones! I tried a few different things over a few weeks, but what finally seems to have worked better was to ask them to loudly repeat simple sentences relevant to their daily life formed in two different tense formats : present simple and present continuous. Many thanks to a good friend of mine for this great suggestion!

I was always good at writing essays in school, but I have never liked formal grammar. In fact, I learnt the terms “present simple” and “present continuous” only few weeks back while figuring out how to teach these village kids. I am sure my amazing English teacher at school taught me all these terms and their meanings, but my brain is hardwired to forget anything that it does not consider important enough.

Now of course, it does not mean that I will now start teaching these terms to my village kids. Not at all! I did not even mention it to them. I presented the ideas in a more relatable manner. Present simple is for actions that happen, and present continuous is for actions that are happening right now.

“I eat breakfast early in the morning” vs “I am eating breakfast”.

I did not give them any sentences on my own. I told them to come with their own sentences in Hindi from their daily life. And then I told them the translation in both these tense formats. We did a lot of practice this way, and I think they are able to form simple sentences now much better than what they could do earlier.

So whats next? Should I tell them about other tense formats? Not really. I think that would be too complicated. Will share the next steps in the next blog coming up soon.