Believe it or not, there are plenty of ways to learn every day something new. Let’s take an English language for example.

Even though English lessons are full of interesting materials, games, videos and songs, sometimes it can be very tiring to learn all the grammar rules that are written in the plan. After few months of being a volunteer here in school, I noticed one interesting thing. Students who are playing computer games are very good in English for their age. They were more confident to start a conversation and their vocabulary is wider. Maybe their grammar knowledge is not the best, but they are not afraid to talk and to make mistakes. We all know that the mistakes are one of better ways to learn. Over time, with help of computer games, children can develop other skills, like memory, fast decision-making and social interaction.

There are also other ways to learn English. Listening to music, reading books and articles, watching films and TV series in English is great way of learning language. In fact, that’s where most of my vocabulary comes from. I like watching TV series and that’s how I learned a lot of English phrases. Also, my pronunciation got better. Besides this, some songs helped me to remember some grammar rules and how to spell some words. For example, I was looking for the lyrics of the song “Soldier Of Fortune” so many times that I had to learn that the word “Soldier” is written like that, not “Solider” which I thought before. Thanks to the song “Simply The Best” I remembered that article “the” always goes before superlative.

So, my advice to the children would be to watch their favourite films, TV series and cartoons in English, to listen to the music in English and to try to understand the lyrics and over time the improvement will be visible.

By Natalija from Serbia, participant of the project ‘Act to activate’

The European Voluntary Service project ‘Act to activate’ is organised within the framework of Erasmus+ and financed by European Commission.