Sunday 30 November 2008

FRACTURED FAIRY TALES

"Fractured fairy tales are traditional fairy tales, rearranged to create new plots with fundamentally different meanings or messages. Fractured fairy tales are closely related to fairy‐tale parodies, but the two serve different purposes: parodies mock individual tales and the genre as a whole; fractured fairy tales, with a reforming intent, seek to impart updated social and moral messages". Read full Answers.com entry from this link.

Fractured fairy tales are usually funny and could be used in the English classroom for different purposes, especially with older students in Primary. Although the text difficulty level might be too high, the context is familiar and that helps understanding. Further activities could focus on comparison with the traditional tale or the creation of alternative scenes or endings.

This is an example on video:


And this site contains a collection of written versions.

The following presentation (source http://www.slideshare.net/USAteacher/fractured-fairytale/) gives some basic hints for producing new version of fairy tales:


Fractured Fairytale
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: fractured fairytale)

Tuesday 25 November 2008

Calendars


Now that the end of a year is approaching, activities using calendars can be a good idea for introducing or revising dates, days of the week, events, planning work...


These are some webs which offer different resources that could help organise those classroom tasks:






Big Huge Labs allows to design a month page with the picture you like to add. Once you get the image, click on it to save it into your computer.


Time and Date generates year calendars with mention of the national holidays in different countries.


Advent calendars:

Printable version from The Toy Maker Christmas page: Outside / Inside

Printable templates to create an advent calendar with personalised pictures from Kodak: Front picture / Back template



Other miscellaneous resources on Calendarhome.


Source of the image: www.flickr.com/photos/94805433@N00/374317069


Tuesday 18 November 2008

Two websites with interesting resources for Nursery and Primary

Learn to Read contains visual online animations with stories, karaoke... Especially useful for young students.

Learning Page provides a good collection of classroom materials that can be downloaded and printed. Lesson plans, books, worksheets... Signing up is required.

Tuesday 4 November 2008

Visible Body

Visible Body is a human anatomy visualization tool. It features complete interactive, 3D human anatomy models and allows users to get closer or more general views of the body systems, turn them in order to appreciate details, etc.

It works with Internet Explorer and requires to instal some plugins. Otherwise, registration is for free.

Monday 3 November 2008

Learning about Learning

Learning and Teaching Scotland website offers some resources for teachers on a variety of educational matters. Among them, you can find this section on Learning about Learning , one of the eight basic competences we should take into account when planning our school syllabi.

Baby Triplets' Stories

Anglès365 website includes a link to access a series of video stories featuring the Baby Triplets.
This is an example:


Edu3.cat