more through recreation. Those are children’ needs that should be considered by the teacher before teaching and designing the activities.
Children at this stage grow rapidly and like to learn something new. Based on the writer’s experience, children in kindergarten have characteristics that really
need teachers’ attention.
b. Children’s Learning Strategies
This part will discuss about the way children learn. The children have their own strategies in learning especially in learning foreign language. The writer only
quotes from the journal which was written by McGlothlin in 1997. He states that there are six strategies in which the children will learn they are:
1 A child is not in the least interested in language for its own sake. In fact,
children never focus on the language at all. Language is always secondary things for children. To a child, the value of language is measured by its
ability to help them enjoy their main interests. Therefore, children will learn language easily when the language is used to support their primary interest
that is playing.
2 A child does not let language that he does not understand confuse him.
When children hear language that they do not understand, it really disturbs them. This is related to the fact that language never be the main focus of a
child. Children will not care about something that they cannot understand.
3 A child enjoys the repetitive events of his life, and uses this enjoyment to
help him learn the new language. The repetitive events give children a sense of security and order, and as they begin to understand the order in the events
of his life, they also begin to understand the order in the language that is associated with those events.
4 A child uses his primary interest to help him learn the language related to
those interests. For example, when a child touches his father’s face and he directly pointed to his father’s eyes because that is the most interesting
things for him. Because his interest is so strongly focused on the eyes, he learns that word first.
5 A child directs his attention to things that are easy to understand. He does
not things about his future, what he thinks are the people around him and the things around him. He thinks about the things which are easily be given a
name. Children are naturally given a rich environment in which to learn language
and also given the ability to acquire that language from the surroundings.
B. Theoretical Framework
A set of learning models for Mata Air Rumah Bermain dan Belajar, Condongcatur is designed to fulfill the needs of learning English for kindergarten
