Hands On Activities for Young Learners

For most of the time, I teach English to students who do not speak English as a first language. Often these students are young children. There seems to be a lot of pressure in Taiwan for students to learn. So the curriculum is structured so that students are expected to learn a great deal of language fairly uncontextually.
This orientation is significantly different to the western approach to teaching, for language and all other subjects. A hands on approach or an inquiry based approach is prefered for young learners. I am advocating a similar approach for Taiwanese students, especially younger students. Obvioulsy the way this occurs would depend upon the context, and I will use two recent examples (or non-examples) to illustrate this point.
The first comes from a kindergarten class I teach 8 hours a week (2 hours X 4 days) teaching children about 4-5 years old. They can understand a lot of spoken English, but they are much more engaged in hands on activities. A good example happened last week while we were cutting leaves our of paper to make a fishing game. Not only were students learning a lot of English by watching the process and following that process, but also I could check their understanding of what was required by looking at their actions. They could also learn more, or check their understanding, by watching what their classmates were doing. One student who has not previously demonstrated a high level of understanding of English, astounded me when she cut out a shape and showed it to me. I said, "That's very good, but it doesn't look like a leaf." She said, "It's a rectangle." BTW, I would not have made such a comment except that I learned by doing my course in teaching art that one must really look at children's efforts and comment upon what one sees.
The second example comes from a class of second year English learners who have a low level of English proficiency. This week was I taught another science lesson, quite eager to advance what we have been doing after two great hands on lessons. They had really engaged in the topic with these activities. This week's attempt was to do more abstract stuff, looking at videos, pictures and books about typhoons (the subject of our lesson) and try to generate some talk about the topic. This did not work so well and I will have to go back to a more hands on approach to teach science.
These two examples reiterate to me what I have already known, practical, contextual learning works best for elementary learners.