I have been teaching ESL at a small school in China for just over 2 years. We teach two levels of students. Level 1 is kindergarten, and level 2 is primary school kids until the age of 12. At our school, the class structure has been pretty tight. The class plan was always written by the TA's and filled from beginning to end with lessons, allowing no free time. In a 1.5 hour class, every class was structured in this way:

0-10 minutes: warm up (including a simon says game, teaching numbers and roll call)
10-20 minutes: actions from the book (open the door, etc this is just for L1) plus a "misc" section which is just an added random vocabulary section.
20-30 minutes: New vocabulary (where you were expected to drill, play a small game, and then a bigger game)
30-40 minutes: New question/Grammar in which you taught the sentence or question/answer and played a blackboard game.
40-50 minutes: Breaktime
50-60 minutes: review vocabulary, and play a game
60-70 minutes: review questions and grammar, and play a game
70-80 minutes: Letters, and play a game
80-90 minutes: DVD time for L1, dictation for L2

And EVERY class was the same. Different games, sure, but the classes themselves became so ridiculously redundant. There isn't a moment to add in any additional teaching or free practice or basically to just "go with the flow" and connect with the students. And this has always really bothered me.

So my boss and I have been talking about ways to improve this, and I have been begging to change our class structure to open up more time for free practice. Lately I have been running the class a little differently.

In the first half, I use review questions during roll call. Call a name and ask a question. Then straight to vocabulary where we just drill and play a quick game, or even just an activity such as calling on random students to spell one of the words. After practicing the vocab for a little bit, i go to the question/grammar (same as before) and I'll usually allow a fun game for this part. Have the students practice by coming two up at a time, ask and answer each other, and take a turn at the game. After a few times of studying these words or questions, I will pick only the best ones to play the game.

After this, I go through the stack of review vocab words, just once, maybe throwing in an incorrect word so they can call me stupid and correct me. And the last thing I do is teach letters, which never takes very long.

By now I've already taught all the new work, and reviewed the previous class work. After breaktime, I am usually left with 30 minutes until the end of class. I will use this differently for the two levels. For L1, I will allow them to color a picture or make crafts or the like. For example, last week they all made paper dolls and colored them to represent their family. I went back and forth between students during this time and asked previously-learned questions like "Who's this?" "what is he wearing?" and "what color is his hat?" The last 10 minutes they watched an English DVD. For L2, I had some classes work on a word search, while a different class worked on word scrambles, both relating to previous vocab.

Basically, I wanted the first half of class to be teaching, and the second half to be working together and practicing. I've faced some criticism from the Chinese staff who think this is all time being wasted, but I disagree.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how a class for kindergarten and a class for primary school can be, or should be, structured? Any examples you can provide would be GREATLY appreciated as I really care about my students and want to do the best I can for them!!!