Thursday 24 November 2011

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.

Wednesday 23 November 2011

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.

Tuesday 22 November 2011

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

Thursday 17 November 2011

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.


Friday 4 November 2011

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?