BBC Schools

BBC Schools is a web intended to provide practice and reinforcement of school contents from the Primary and Seondary curricula in the UK. Many of its resources can be also used by students of English as a foreign language, especially in classrooms working in a CLIL approach or at home as a kind of 'voluntary homework'.

This is a selection of four activities which combine content with oral or written comprehension skills practice:

Weather Report

The Recycling Game

Plants and Animals in the Local Environment

Moving and Growing

VII Jornadas Nacionales sobre Secciones Bilingües

Thanks to Fernando Trujillo via his blog De Estranjis, I've been following the contents of a Congress on Bilingual Schools that is being held these days in Santander. These are the links to a series of posts on this event: Post 1, Post 2, Post 3, Post 4, Post 5, Post 6, Post 7, Post 8.

Comic Book Creator

EduComics Project is a European Comenius activity which will deal with the use of e-comics in education. They intend to use the following software for creating the classroom materials:

Comic Book Creator is a tool that allows the creation of dynamic web comic books. An author can create an e-comic book by combining images of characters, pictures, background, text in balloons which can be placed in the frames of the pages of the book in that way and style desired. The produced dynamic web comic books are highly interactive flash based books that provide a great page flipping animation control opportunity as well as features like zooming, printing and easy navigation.

Research on L2 oracy

I read in this post of De Estranjis blog about a doctoral thesis on the emergence of L2 oracy in bilingual education. A short summary highlights the main advantages of teaching school subjects in a second language within a CLIL approach.

Slide presentations related to music

Bulletin Boards for the Music Classroom website contains a large set of PPT files related to songs in its Downloads section.

Some of them contain lyrics, e.g. "Don't Worry, be Happy", and some other just show a sequence of pictures to help follow the song, such as this one: "I Know an Old Lady"

CLIL Practice: Perspectives from the Field

CLIL Practices: Perspectives from the Field is a publication prepared by the CLIL Cascade Network (CCN), which gives an overview of CLIL developments and of the methodological approaches teachers are experimenting with in Europe.

It includes a set of 24 articles organised in three sections: Regional Features of Practice, Classroom Features of Practice, Supporting Practice through Teacher Education, and Reflection on Practice.

Teachers exchange

This is just a short informative notice about the 'intercambio puesto por puesto' a project within the European Lifelong Learning Programme.

Sparklebox

Sparklebox is a teaching resource website, meant as a means of sharing useful downloadable resources with other teachers. Although it is aimed at UK young school children, many of the resources collected there can be really helpful in the EFL primary classroom.

Sharing teaching tips and ideas

What does work in the Primary EFL classroom? You can share your ideas by recording or typing comments around this Voicethread screen:

Assessing CLIL

We can find some interesting contributions on what and how to assess in CLIL approaches in Café CLIL 06: Assessment in CLIL web page discussion.

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.

Getting sound files to enhance oral productions

These are a couple of links to collections of sound effects that can be downloaded from the Web:

Sounddogs
Banco de imágenes y sonidos