Thursday 18 December 2008

How to say 'velcro' in English?


Wikipedia provides a quite complete explanation on hook-and-loop fasteners , an everyday object that we usually refer to by its brand name.

This song presents an instance of use for 'velcro fastener'.

Wednesday 10 December 2008

Story Place


StoryPlace website contains some stories that can be personalised to some extent by choosing some characters, naming them... Part of the text has to be read and some other parts, especially the characters' dialogues, are heard.

Monday 8 December 2008

Integrated approach to language teaching

The Education Department of the Junta de AndalucĂ­a has recently published a series of documents on a common approach to the teaching of languages at school. They can be downloaded from the following link: CurrĂ­culo integrado de las lenguas

Friday 5 December 2008

ESL Video

ESL Video allows registered users to create multiple choice questionnaires ('Questions') related to any video from Youtube or a similar site. This tool gives also the possibility of attaching the written dialogues, lyrics, etc. in the recording soundtrack (Transcript') or adding notes or further open questions ('Notes').

Some teachers have started creating their own but not all of them are complete. Anyway, it is worth browsing through this site for a while and searching for something that could be useful for a particular lesson.

This is an example:

Thursday 4 December 2008

Videos for children

Totlol site displays a collection of videos from Youtube addressed to children. They are categorised according to different criteria such as topic, ranking based on aduts' rating, time of publication...

Wednesday 3 December 2008

The Twelve Days of Christmas

Traditional version:



Lyrics

Alternative version with Shrek:


Lyrics

This video contains the same song with pictures which can help students follow the lyrics.

Visual dictionary

elements of ancient costume [5] - Visual Dictionary Online

Merriam Webster Visual Dictionary Online contains around 6,000 labelled pictures organised in semantic fields such as 'Earth', 'Human Being', Clothing', etc. more thoroughly classified in subcategories within each field. It also provides games for testing word knowledge by labelling the parts of an object and sound to check or learn pronunciation.