suggestions for curriculum

[sauveterre]

Hello, I live in a small French village and thought it would be nice to offer an English class for the villagers. I'm not a teacher, and this is my first ever experience but I have studied the English language at university level and I have always been interested in language in general. Of course in learning French I have compared various aspects of the two languages continually.
I anticipated about 6-8 people turning up. The first week I had 18 peope of varying ability, the second week twenty. Last week I only had six because of the rain. They were the most advanced speakers and it was nice and easy, but this week, I am told, a couple and their three teenage children are coming too. It is getting out of hand and I think I am going to be obliged to split them into two classes, beginers and advanced.
My main problem is, I need some sort of guidence on an order of some sort in which to teach things, I'm not keen on too much grammer-none of them wants to pass an exam, just to be able to communicate- but there is so much to teach, and I don't want to be dotting around all over the place. Can you help me?

[MaryTeacher]

Hi-

You could try working with themes. You could make a list of possible themes that would be of interest to your group, and let them choose the ones they'd like to work on. That would give you a focus for working on.

When you have the themes decided, you could look at what types of language and activities might fall under that theme. For example, if the theme is "Food", you could look at vocabulary for food and cooking. Grammar could be count/non count nouns, partitives... Speaking could include dialogues for ordering in restaurants, shopping, giving instructions. Students could write their favorite recipe, or write a restaurant review.

You could end the unit with a potluck party with the class.

For any theme, you would choose related activities and build on those. It can work well with multi-level groups.

I hope this makes sense!

Good luck!
Mary

[sauveterre]

Thank you very much Mary, that is very helpful. I have begun with getting them all to greet each other in different ways and reply to the question "How are you" in different ways, so moving on to a restuarant scenario would seem natural.
Thnaks agin.
Jacqui