Language activities related to football

Soccerlingua presents a set of five games aimed at practising some basic vocabulary and structures through games based on football.

Merry Christmas

Some nursery rhymes

This website includes links to a set of traditional nursery rhymes displayed in sequences of four pictures that can be used as a poster on the interactive whiteboard (and listen to or read along a particular rhyme) or can be printed out (and make booklets, reading cards...)

Storybird

Storybird allows the user to choose from a set of pictures drawn by a professional artist in order to create thir own stories. It somehow reverses the process of visual storytelling, i.e. from words to pictures, and requests the creator of a new story to start with the image and "unlock" the story inside.

This video explains the process

A couple of examples of books created by Storybird users:

Two Ways on Storybird
Colors Of The Rainbow on Storybird

Eurolib

"The European Children’s Travelling Language Library, is a European Union funded project. It is targeted at motivating children that have recently started to learn a foreign language to:

• Exposure them to the rich heritage of European languages and cultures
• Be motivated to learn languages
• Build a love of reading as the best form of autonomous lifelong learning
• Reinforce emerging literacy.

(...) illustrated children's books in six European languages will travel from school to school across Europe. Each school has the library for a period and has to carry out a number of educational and collaborative activities (...) The target group for the project is students in their first year of learning a foreign language (...) Initially the libraries will be available in Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the UK and later in other countries".

Further information

An online activity to practise numeracy skills

Ann and Addem's Dartboard Game allows children to reinforce oral identification of numbers while practising mental arithmetic.

CLIL resources

The Andalusian educational authorities have just published on the Internet a set of teaching units aimed at working on different topics from different subjects in English.

Several activities created with LIM

LIM (Libros Interactivos Multimedia) is a free authoring tool that allows the creation of activities for the classroom. Some teachers of English have shared their outcomes in this webpage.

Example: INVERTEBRATES

A selection of activities related to Christmas

These are some ideas for celebrating Christmas in the English classroom:

LearnEnglishKids website includes a set of activities on Xmas.

Make a Snowman, for instance, can be nice for young children. It allows pupils to make decisions in order to design their own snowman. After the handicraft activity, students can be requested to describe their snowman. Alternative: children in pairs give directions to each other for creating their snowman, e.g. "It is wearing a brown hat"... Related story.

Whose Present can be a nice choice for identifying oral vocabulary related to toys and presents.

Primary Resources also collects a good number of materials about Christmas.

Christmas Around the World, for instance, is a Power Point presentation with facts about ways of celebrating Xmas around the world. It can be downloaded and edited in order to adapt the language to your students' needs.

An idea for follow-up activities:

• The teacher introduces the topic by eliciting information about the Xmas festivals presented in the document.
• Students listen to and read the text.
• Students in group prepare questions for a quizz on the information in the presentation.

Christmas Coordinates. A mathematical challenge for older students.

The Twelve Days of Christmas. A presentation to accompany the singing of the traditional carol of that name.

Woodlands Junior School website includes the following activities:

An online advent calendar to learn about country flags and Christmas traditions.

Information about British traditions.

Using mobile devices in the classroom

In this post from TeachingEnglish website the following video presents some ideas about how mobile devices can be used in the EFL classroom. The topic can be debatable especially when related to some teaching contexts: wouldn't there be a risk of overusing or misusing these devices in large groups?

Voki

Voki is a simple online tool often used in the EFL primary classroom. It is based on the selection of an avatar which will utter any word or sentence (up to 60 seconds long if using the free option; 90 seconds are allowed to Classroom Voki users). It works as follows:

1. Select a character

2. Change the look
3. Add voice via microphone, text to speech or upload a file.
4. Choose a background
5. Click Publish to email or get code

The Voki web site also includes a set of teaching ideas.

Pic-your-wits vocabulary games

Pic-your-wits is a set of vocabulary games (actions, animals, household objects...). The goal is to identify the word represented in a picture in less than 20 seconds. It can be useful for revising vocabulary on the interactive whiteboard.

Online language exercises

OUP New English File Online website includes some useful resources to practise grammar, vocabulary, listening, reading, and pronunciation.

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Howjsay: a free online pronunciation dictionary

Howjsay provides a list of around 150,000 English words that can be heard in a clear standard pronunciation. Although it includes quite a lot of publicity, the search is easy and quick and the quality of the sound good enough to be used in the classroom.

When the result of a search appears in pink, the word can be heard once and again just by placing the mouse over it. Furthermore, it allows to list up to 15 entries by writing them separated by semicolons: a very useful option for practising aural recognition of close phonemes.

Build Your Wild Self: a tool to create fantastic characters

Build Your Wild Self allows the creation of fantastic characters made up of a variety of parts of animal or human bodies. It can be useful for working on descriptions.

Several online resources presented in a Teachers' Day in Donostia

These are the links to some websites mentioned at the 2011 MacMillan Teachers' Day held in San Sebastian earlier this month: Moshi Monsters Glogster. Examples: grahamstanley, forever, blankglog. Web Tools for EFL

A TV programme aimed at learning English

Play TV shows are addressed to Catalan speaking children with the aim of helping them learn English.

Online games for young learners

Whiz Kid Games web site presents a set of nine interactive games that can be suitable for young learners or learner with special needs. The language is clear and the activities simple. They can be useful and fun especially when an interactive whiteboard is available.

Interactive online activities

Click 'n' Learn website offers a good range of online activities aimed at learning and revising lexicon and structures. Although it is addressed to secondary education students, a good number of the activities will surely turn out useful and attractive to primary learners.

Children's books to be read and listened to

MeeGenius website includes six free picture books that can be read and listened to.

Online language games

From this blog I get to know about some online interactive games that can be helpful in the classroom. These are three of them:

Wheel of Fortune Revision Game Level 1
It is shaped like a team quiz competition. Useful for revising the alphabet, prepositions, greetings... with the whole class, especially with the aid of an interactive board.

Past Simple Verb Tense
Good for revising past simple forms.

Character Scrapbook
A nice tool to work on the language of descriptions.

More games

Stories read by children

I learn from Teacher Training Videos about Smories, a collection of stories written for children and read out by children. Although many of them can be hard to to follow without pictures or text by young EFL students, some others can be really motivating.

An example:

Mommy! No More Singing!

Twist Our Words

Channel 4 proposes to play a word game by selecting words from a given list and creating sentences with them. A short video is then generated in which some Channel 4 personalities utter the sentence word by word.

Rhyming dictionaries

There are several online rhyming dictionaries that can be helpful for practising pronunciation or creating short poems in the classroom.

These are three examples:

Rhymes.net

WriteExpress Online Rhyming Dictionary

Poetry.com Rhyming Dictionary

help us find

A couple of resources to create cartoons

Comic Creator allows to create short cartoons (from one to six panels) by using some simple and clear black and white pictures. Students choose characters and props, add captions and dialogues and print them out.

MakeBeliefComix has a wider range of characters and they can be chosen in a variety of moods. This site also offers some blank three-panel cartoons to be printed out and filled in on paper.