A premier skills sundays lesson at ILC Hua Hin runs for ninety minutes every Sunday morning and follows a structure that gives children enough routine to feel settled while varying enough that no two sessions feel identical. Parents considering enrolling a child often want a concrete answer to a simple question: what actually happens in the room? The answer is more specific and more interesting than most course descriptions convey.
Stage One: Vocabulary Review That Does Not Feel Like A Test
Every premier skills sundays lesson begins by revisiting vocabulary from the previous session, but not in the format of a test or a written exercise. The review is oral, short and structured as a low-stakes activity: describing a player using last week’s vocabulary, answering a quick question about the ongoing Locomotive London story, completing a sentence about a match result. The point is to re-activate language that was encountered last week before introducing anything new, so that the session builds on what children already have rather than starting from scratch.
HATRIQA’s engage-learn-produce methodology builds this vocabulary recycling into the structure of every premier skills sundays lesson deliberately. Words encountered in one session reappear in subsequent sessions in slightly different contexts, and the opening review is one of the mechanisms that makes this recycling explicit. Children often notice themselves using vocabulary they did not realise they had retained until the review moment.
Stage Two: Reading Into Discussion
The main activity in every premier skills sundays lesson is a reading passage followed directly by a speaking task that uses the language from what children have just read. The passage might be a match report, a player profile, the next chapter of the Locomotive London story or a first-person account from a fictional player’s perspective. Children read, answer comprehension questions designed to check genuine understanding rather than surface recall, identify the key vocabulary of the session, and then move directly into a speaking task.
The speaking task is not a loosely related activity at the end of the reading work. It is the destination that the reading has been building towards. A premier skills sundays lesson is not a reading lesson with speaking added. It is a speaking lesson that uses reading as the input. The British Council and Premier League’s Premier Skills English curriculum is explicit about this: communicative output is the primary goal, and every other element of the session feeds into it.
Stage Three: Structured Discussion That Develops Across The Session
The discussion activities in a premier skills sundays lesson are not open-ended conversations. They are structured exchanges with specific communicative goals: defend a choice with evidence, challenge a classmate’s position with a specific reason, acknowledge a counter-argument before maintaining a position. The structure is more explicit in the early sessions and becomes less prescriptive as children develop confidence and fluency.
What is consistent across all eight sessions is that every child in the group is required to participate, every argument is heard and responded to, and the teacher’s role is to push each child to extend their response rather than to evaluate its correctness. A premier skills sundays lesson measured by its quality should produce children who are speaking more, saying more complex things, and using more of the session’s vocabulary in the final discussion than they used in the first one. Krashen’s research on language acquisition confirms that the mechanism is cumulative communicative exposure rather than explicit correction.
Stage Four: The Close That Carries Into Next Week
Every premier skills sundays lesson ends with something unresolved: a prediction about the story that will be answered next week, a debate that ran out of time, a vocabulary point that a child noticed and wanted to explore further. These deliberate loose ends are the mechanism that keeps children engaged between sessions, thinking about the story and the discussion in the week before they return.
Take the free English level test and book a consultation before the intake begins. Premier Skills Sundays is open to any family in Hua Hin with a child aged seven to nine. For school groups, the Premier Skills Camp and ILC residential English tours offer the same approach in a residential format. Contact ILC directly.
