The popular children’s show, Blues Clues was a huge hit with kids when it first aired in 1996, which had producers of other children’s shows like Seasame Street asking why. The reason it was such a success is that they replayed the same episode three times a week in order to encourage its educational methods to ’stick’ in a child’s mind. One would think that this would bore children, but it had the complete opposite effect: the kids could relate to the content provided as they were able to repeat the songs, games and activities seen on the show. The best part of it is that they were learning without even knowing it!

What does Blues Clues and teaching ESL have in common? Repetition. No matter what age of student you are teaching, when a students finally ‘gets’ something that they have been trying to learn, they feel a true sense of self accomplishment.

Repetition is a great way to learn, however you decide to incorporate it into your teaching. What you have to be careful of is keeping the material interesting, as learning and repeating sentences out of a grammar book, for example, will only make your students bored and uninterested in the lesson. Find out what your students are into – popular music, TV shows, etc - and then come up with a lesson out of that. Keeping the interest of your students is paramount in how much they learn and more importantly, retain.