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.

Vidtionary

Vidtionary is described as a video dictionary, i.e. words are visually explained through pictures in a short video clip. The entries can be searched alphabetically, by topic, or according parts of speech.  It also includes some quizzes and wordless versions of the videos aimed at guessing the word.

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?

A video presentation by students from Elatzeta school

KATEA city from Elatzeta 2.Zikloa on Vimeo.

Link to Elatzeta English blog

Flocabulary: educational videos

Flocabulary is an online learning platform that delivers educational hip-hop songs and videos. Some samples can be watched without subscription.

A couple of  examples:
Gimme 6    I Ate 8 

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.

A TV programme aimed at learning English

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

Earth Day

Although a bit late to celebrate this year's Earth Day, this video can be useful to practise a simple structure such as 'I want...' and link it to environmental issues. Furthermore, it could serve as a starting point to express ideas about other environmental, social or ethical concerns within short projects or other kinds of activities that require oral or written output.

Bilingual education in different autonomous communities

Thanks to Educantabria TV Congress Channel, we can access interesting lectures and presentations. Among the videos from the VII Jornadas Nacionales: Secciones Bilingües, we find the following two, which can be of interest to get an idea of foreign language learning project implementation in several autonomous communities in Spain:

Experiencias autonómicas en organización de programas bilingües: Educación Primaria

Experiencias autonómicas en organización de programas bilingües: Educación Secundaria

Educational videos in English

NeoK12 website gives access to an organised collection of educational videos for Nursery, Primary and Secondary classes.

Videoteca educativa also presents a small selection of recommended videos to be used in the English classroom.

Drama

These are some links to webstites that include advice and resources to use drama in the primary classroom:

Primary resources: Playscripts

The English e-corner: Drama activities

Tom's TELF Drama (video recordings): The Giant Pumpkin, The Scary Hike, The Gingerbread Man, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

The Animals Save the Planet

The Animals Save the Planet website presents several short cartoons where advice to take care of our environment is given. The shorts are funny and contain just a sentence at the end of each sketch. Further explanations about the issues mentioned in the sketches can be found on the How You Can Help section.

EnglishSongsDVD.com

A good collection of video clips aimed at young learners of English can be found in this video channel.

This is an example:

Schoolhouse Rock!

I've just watched a lively video about English prepositions in a blog I follow. After browsing through the Internet for a bit more of information, I have found out that it belongs to the Schoolhouse Rock! series. Some of the clips are related to grammar and can be useful to help students revise or reinforce their knowledge of various parts of speech.

This is an example:

Subtitled videos

dotSUB is a tool that allows anyone to translate and subtitle video content into multiple languages. Although at the moment there are not many suitable videos to be used in the Primary English classroom, it is worth browsing through the clip collection and try to find something useful.

See an example below. You can change the language of the subtitles from the options bar.

TEFL Clips

TEFLclips is a site dedicated to the use of YouTube and other video sharing sites in the English classroom. They upload a new lesson plan every week.

A couple of Easter videos

Origami Easter Basket
This web page shows a video with instruction to make an origami coloured paper basket. Script is available.

This other video can be useful for practising counting and numbers with young children.

Downloading videos from YouTube

I read in this post about an easy way of downloading videos from YouTube. It allows two formats: flv (Flash Video), and mp4 when that second option is possible.

Downloading videos

Links to some videos commented in the last seminar session:

- LEMON TREE
- COOL WATER CYCLE SONG
- THE WATER CYCLE SONG
- WALLACE AND GROMIT: CHRISTMAS CARDOMATIC
- WALLACE AND GROMIT: SNOWMANATRON
- SESAME STREET THE ALPHABET SONG
- SESAME STREET FAIRY ABC
- SESAME STREET SIGN ALPHABET
- THE THREE LITTLE PIGS: FRACTURED FAIRY TALE
- LITTLE RURAL RIDING HOOD

These are the two ways of downloading and saving videos which we tried:

- Using Keepvid.
- Installing RealPlayer 11 Gold.