Friends Fur Ever

Friends Fur Ever is the name of an eTwinning project based on the topic of 'dogs'. Students from four primary schools explore this topic from different approaches: dogs in literature, songs about dogs, different onomatopoeias for barking, etc.

Link to their Twinspace

School movies

From this link you can access a collection of video recordings showing the work of students from Intxaurrondo Hegoa School. It includes presentations on different topics, sketches, and dubbed cartoons.

GenMagic: online comic generator

GenMagic is a simple way to create short stories. The program allows users to choose from a set of background pictures, objects, animals, characters... and add text to the different six scenes. Once it is finished, the story can be printed out.

Story Maker

Story Maker is a simple activity that allows students to choose several items in a story. It makes three different types of story: fairy stories, horror stories and science-fiction.

Activities for Easter

These are some resources related to Easter and spring:

A story:
The Great Egg Hunt

Handicrafts:
How to Make a Spring Hat

Handouts:
Easter Worksheets

Creating photo stories

Time for a Photo Story proposes a sequence of activities aimed at ESO 1 students. It can be carried out in around ten lessons and gives opportunities to develop language, arts, and ICT skills.




Time for a Photo Story: teacher guide

Time for a Photo Story: student materials

Christmas activities

These are some online activities related to Christmas from the British Council's Learn English Kids site:
'Santa's Little Helper' story
Whose present?
Balloon Burst Christmas

Smories: new stories for children website offers recordings of stories and nursery rhymes told or sung by children (mainly girls!). These are several examples:

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

A Sailor Went To Sea

Can You Jump Like A Kangaroo?

Draw a Stickman

A couple of interactive cartoon stories can be tried on the website of Draw a Stickman app. The layout is simple and attractive and the language of the instructions can be useful for reading and vocabulary work on the interactive whiteboard.

Story Monster

ACMI Story Monster website allows students to design monsters by choosing different features (eyes, wings, body size and colour...). Once the monster is created, the student uses arrow keys and the space bar of the keyboard in order to choose a verb and a noun. A short sentence is generated and uttered.

  

The activity can be useful to work on definitions, pronunciation, or as a start for creative writing.

Story Starters

Story Starters generates sentences at random to begin a story.

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.

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.

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

Children's books to be read and listened to

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

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!