New Sunrise Preschool A Teacher's Guide Unit 1

T4 I. Introduction “There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.” Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky New Sunrise makes short stories central to its pedagogical design, which constitutes a twofold didactic source for language learners. First, they stimulate children’s innate curiosity about the surrounding world. Second, short stories can be placed at the heart of the learning experience since they help develop literacy skills as well as gross and fine motor skills. In addition, in representing the world, they naturally include thought-provoking topics that are excellent for raising children’s social awareness and recognition of human values. This fundamental principle is methodologically combined with other teaching strategies within a multi-layered pedagogical approach which will be described below. II. Principles New Sunrise believes in eclecticism. Therefore, the series embraces a variety of principles, methodologies and strategies which promote the development of the four communicative skills. Communicative Approach New Sunrise has been authored under the premise that learning a language does not merely entail knowing its vocabulary and structure. The goal is to master the language. The series stimulates the use of English through interactive activities that pose communicative challenges: when children feel the need to complete a task, they attempt to fill gaps or share information by any means. Strategies reflecting the Communicative Approach include individual and group work. It may sound obvious, but students learn to communicate in the target language just by communicating. New Sunrise proposes both whole class activities and activities where pupils are arranged in pairs, triads or small groups, which allow teachers not only to tackle linguistic appropriation, but also to help develop social skills: exchanging information, taking turns, respecting others, etc. By doing this, the series adopts a holistic perspective in which all four language skills are worked on from the early stages of learning, with listening and speaking playing a supportive role regarding literacy development. Story-based Approach As mentioned before, New Sunrise makes short stories central to its pedagogical design. These stories have been carefully crafted according to students’ cognitive and affective development, beautifully illustrated, and episodically organized within the units. Each part is, however, self-contained. The stories follow the same narrative structure: a) beginning , where the setting and the characters are introduced; b) middle , where the conflict is developed; and c) end , where the conflict is resolved and the message of the story becomes clear. This structure makes the stories dynamic and is extremely useful for triggering children’s imagination, for example, when the characters go on a trip to another land or daydream about what they would like to be when they grow up. Stories allow learners to experience language in an integrated way. This approach considers that teaching vocabulary and structures is not enough; that interaction is absolutely pivotal to language learning.