Some of the main pedagogical objectives of the material include the development of physical, linguistic and cooperative skills, learning to pay attention and express oneself and mastering learning strategies through repetition or drills. From a linguistic aspect, the educational material is to engage students in the learning process through communicative tasks as well as to help them develop language comprehension and basic oral production.

 

The communicative context of each activity has been selected with a view to attracting the students’ attention through games, songs, pictures, fairy-tales, arts and crafts, while it trains them to work both individually and in groups.

 

Moreover, each activity aims at fostering the learners’ creativity; hence, action-oriented activities, drama, drawing, crafts and board games have played a significant role in the design of the EYL material. Students are also exposed to the English language through a variety of authentic texts which provide a lot of language input, develop thinking skills and help children to adopt different social behaviour.

 

As the programme encourages creativity and flexibility, it does not provide teachers with a coursebook or any kind of traditional material. Instead, teachers have a data bank of activities at their disposal which they can use independently according to their students’ needs and preferences. More specifically, the basic educational material consists of 83 teaching units/activities, 26 supplementary activities for the first grade and 42 extra activities for both classes. There is also a syllabus available for each class, in which teachers can find the activities divided into teaching cycles accompanied by their title, thematic area, their language and pedagogical objectives and the vocabulary students will be taught for each linguistic function. The educational material is available both in digital form, which teachers can download from the EYL project official website, as well as in print in a teacher’s kit.