There are a number of core skills which will underpin your confidence in working with children and are essential to successful teaching and learning. These core skills relate to creating a positive rapport with your learners and thinking carefully about language you use in lessons. They also relate to selecting, setting up and managing activities in a way that maximises learning opportunities and supports your ability to deliver lessons in the most productive way.

For example, with an activity such as dictation, you may choose to do it either as a whole class activity (see 81), or as pair work, using copies of the same text with different missing words which children dictate to their partner, or as group work, in which children take turns to dictate a text from the wall to their group. In making your choice, you need to weigh up the potential risks and benefits for skills development, cooperative learning, enjoyment and orderly classroom management (see C).

When you first start teaching children, you may find it useful to write a detailed script of language you are going to use to give instructions and stage-by-stage notes of how you plan to set up a pair or group work activity effectively. As you become more skilled and proficient in these areas, you’ll find that you no longer need to do this, and these basic, pedagogical skills will become a natural and automatic part of your ‘teaching persona’ and performance.

My key tips for core skills are:

• 5 Build positive relationships

• 6 Watch your language!

• 7 Set up pair and group work effectively

• 8 Choose and use activities wisely

5 Build positive relationships

The way you relate to children, individually and collectively, and the way children relate to each other, has a fundamental influence on their self-esteem, attitudes, behaviour and achievement. Building positive relationships also links closely to values education (see H) since it is through the development of values such as trust, mutual respect, kindness, inclusion and cooperation, that strong, healthy relationships develop.

In order to build positive relationships, you need to:

• • Model social skills you wish children to adopt, for example, saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, using eye contact and active listening.