Hallowe'en pictures

Spooky Spot the Difference and Frankenstein colouring pictures from a couple of books published by Usborne can be used as a treat on these late days of October.

Reading: All About Me

It's Fun to Read: All About Me activity allows children to choose the features of a character that would represent them, a pet, a bedroom, and a toy. They can also work on vocabulary related to the house.

Reading about art

It's Fun to Read: Starfall Art Gallery web site presents six texts about different painters accompanied by pictures showing their artwork. Children can listen to the pronunciation of each word by clicking on them.

Short stories for children to teach values

Bedtime Stories website presents a set of stories aimed at working on values. Most of them can be listened to in different varieties of English and Spanish. Audio recordings are accompanied by the corresponding text and pictures.

A couple of websites to learn and revise vocabulary

Learning Chocolate

Language Guide

Interactive whiteboard resources: Topmarks

Topmarks Education website includes a selection of resources suitable for using them on an interactive whiteboard. Although it is addressed to native speakers of English, many activities can be useful in the EFL primary classroom.

Songs and rhymes for very young learners

Muffinsongs video channel collects a good number of children's songs and nursery to sing along.

Another collection of similar songs -this time in an interactive Java format- can be accessed from this blog.

Some online resources for young learners

In this blog post there are links to a set of Flash digital activities aimed at nursery or first levels of primary education.

Some resources for promoting early reading skills

Reading is Fundamental web site includes a set of resources (readings, games, songs, colouring images...) aimed at pre-school children. Some of them can be also useful in the primary EFL classroom. These are a couple of examples:

Caterpillar, Caterpillar song.

House for Sale story.

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.

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.

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.

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.