1. What do you mean by "a small group of kids"? How many do you have?
2. 7 - 12 is a significant spread of ages. In my opinion, a 7 year old is not ready to sit and absorb new information for an hour at a time. At 10 - 12, maybe they're ready, it depends on the student. You need to be prepared to cut the class short if you notice the student(s) getting fidgety or 'glazed over'. Parents need to understand that sometimes, the class may not run the entire hour, but you will be charging for the full hour.
3. It sounds to me as if you should split the group up by ability- at least into two groups.
4. In our program, we do individual, private lessons in our home. We occasionally take pairs if they are similar in ability and parents want it, but we promote the concept that the student's progress is tailored to their ability. They won't be held up by slower students or left behind by the more advanced ones. It's more efficient (and profitable) to do groups, but our parents like our plan and we have a waiting list. Almost all of our lessons are 30 minutes, once a week. We have one student who comes for an hour and we have one who comes 30 minutes two times per week.
5. Be prepared to 'weed out' students who are not making progress. It's painful at first as you want to build clientele and make some money, but word of mouth is your best marketing tool and you definitely don't want parents of (lazy) students telling their friends, "Oh, I sent my little darling to GenerationX1990, but his grades don't seem to be improving. Maybe GX1990 is not such a great teacher..." We have rejected students who were:
A. Just going through the motions to get Mom/Dad off their back. You are not a babysitter.
B. Overwhelmed/overworked by too many tutoring classes- music, sports, and other subjects. Kids get burnt out, and you will learn to notice the signs.
C. Just plain dumb or lazy. Thinking about English (or any subject) for only 30 minutes once per week is never going to make much progress. The kid has to want to learn English. Most of them do.
6. Be prepared to lose your favorite students somewhere around Middle School. Schools in China take a crazy amount of a student's time. We used to have high schoolers, but now we are lucky to keep them past elementary.
7. Depending on where you are, you may lose your best and brightest students as parents send them away to cities with better schools.
8. The time for deciding what you should teach and in what order should have been made long before you got to China!
9. Here's what we (my wife is Chinese, but I don't speak Chinese) do: We don't go much into "useful phrases". In my mind, useful phrases are not the least bit useful unless the other speaker is on the same 'script', and they never are. The best thing your students will get from you is exposure to a native speaker. Speak to them in English and stop often to make sure they understand what you said. Our program is mostly based on learning phonics- how to say a word they see and how to spell a word they hear. Chinese students need to learn that yes, English has many more words than Chinese, but all those words are made up of only 26 letters. Once they learn the sounds for the letters and a few rules, we go to learning words: Body parts, then prepositions, then adjectives. We give them a notebook and we make up sentences using the words that they write in their book. For example: "I have a blue bike." or "There is a noodle shop across the street." Their assignment is to rewrite the words several times and the sentences once. After all that, we transition into reading. Now they need to understand what the words mean to the story, not just describing a picture on a flash card.
10. Make them say all of the words! Chinese students tend to drop final consonants.
