Articles on CLIL

These two educational magazines (in Spanish) have recently published articles on CLIL implementation:

Cuadernos de Pedagogía, number 395, November 2009.

Prácticas en educación bilingüe/plurilingüe (mentioned in a former post)

Creating videos from Power Point presentations

Slideboom website offers a free tool to convert Power Point presentations into Flash videos. After installing the required software, presentations can be uploaded. Once the the file is converted (it maintains transitions, sound, etc.), an embedding code is provided.

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:

The first issue of Prácticas en educación bilingüe/plurilingüe magazine contains a variety of school practice examples and resource recommendations related to CLIL.

Furthermore, Bilingual Education Platform - BEP Ning site pays special attention to teachers' exchange, resource organisation, news, etc... focused on CLIL as well as some other issues related to the teaching of second languages.

Free Rice

I read in this post from Palabras Tendidas blog about Free Rice, a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program together with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

You can choose a topic from a selection of subjects (Geograhy, Art, English, Spanish, etc...) and try to answer questions in a quiz. For every right answer, ten grains of rice are donated by the UN World Food Program to help fight hunger in the world.

ESL Young Learners

"ESL Young Learners offers free fun materials for English language learners. These include:
- Original stories and simplified versions of classic texts
- Full PDF print-friendly short stories streamed via Scribd
- Short texts ideal for classroom use
- Glossary & activities to accompany texts
- All texts simplified and graded according to level
- Fun listening and watching materials"

Crickweb: Interactive primary activities

I learn from a message in Anglès 365 distribution list about Crickweb. This site contains a good collection of primary online activities based on the British curriculum. They are classified according levels and subjects. It is worth browsing through them because many can be useful in the CLIL classroom or in other methodological approaches just to reinforce a topic from the textbook. To get an idea of the type of resources you can find there, try these two simple activities about sound recognition and instrument classification or this one, useful to practise the names of some vegetables. The range of activities is wide; some of them are open-ended, like this one where the students have to write dialogues in a story.

Maths

Math is Fun website offers a well-organised selection of maths activities that can be useful in the English classroom in different ways. Thus, it provides many activities with instructions and puzzles which require thorough reading, as in this game, or online exercises such as this money master, useful to reinforce skills learned in the maths lessons. Furthermore, a visual dictionary of mathematical terms is also included.

A Bilingual Project

The web site of IES Sierra Morena Secondary School allows us to get to know some of the materials they use in their bilingual project. Although these online resources are addressed to compulsary secondary students, some activities can also be very useful for primary pupils working in a CLIL approach. This page gives access to several sequences of activities around diffent topics.

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

A congress about CLIL in Barcelona

It is difficult for most of us to have the opportunity to attend many of the events about topics related to the teaching of languages which could be interesting, especially when they are held far away from our home town. Fortunately, we can get some information, feedback or abstracts from the Internet. This is the case of the 'Trobada CLIL' held on 28th and 29th April in Barcelona.

Feeback on some of the lectures can be read on the following two entries in 'De estranjis' blog:

Lecciones de Barcelona: en enseñanza de idiomas, ¿hacia dónde vamos?

Lecciones de Barcelona: se puede aprender de Madrid

Further information about the contents of the lectures can be read in this book of abstracts.

Some ideas for short projects when working in a CLIL approach

Looking for some ideas and resources related to CLIL in Primary, I've come across the following presentation by Nina Lauder. I find some suggestions inspirational to introduce project work related to other curricular subjects in the English classroom.

Project Work and CLIL

View more presentations from Nina Lauder.

I see that several ideas are taken from the JET series of books published by Scholastic. Some sample pages on that site can give ideas of the contents in the books, such as this mini book on Sports.

Funny English

Funny English website contains many worksheets with crosswords, minibooks, cards... that can be really useful in the English classroom.

CLIL units

This website gives access to a set of units to work on different topics in the English classroom. Many of them are addressed to Secondary students but there are also proposals for Primary: The Human Body, Air & Atmosphere, Ecosystems, Habitats & Ecosystems, Water in Nature , Plants, Education for Health, The Earth and Living Things, Exploring Food , Exploring Food , Growth, Sculpture , Landscapes, Understanding Comics How to draw a comic strip, Houses of the World, Exploring 2D Shapes, ICT in English, Where are you from? A country report, Living and Moving around the World,

Some useful websites to work on the universe

These are some links to websites with useful resources for classes working on the universe as a topic in their English coursebooks or through projects in a CLIL approach.

- NASA for Students offers a wide range of materials sorted out according to school grades or levels. Each set contains stories, interactive activities, videos, glossaries...

- Solar System Planets are introduced in size order in a video presentation. Its author adds an imaginary planet, Tamen, and explains the impossibility of its dimeensions in the written information provided in YouTube.

- Amazing Space website's section Tonight's Sky uses images taken by Hubble Space Telescope to explain what can be seen in the night sky each month.

- Some other links and information can be found in this other blog, created some years ago to help teachers with the implementation of The Universe Unit in INEBI pilot scheme.

Power Point presentations in English

A colleague emails me the reference of this collection of slide presentations related to various curricular subjects and topics, e.g. science, geography, health... it is part of Miss PopCorn's Page, a website devoted to the learning of English as a second language in primary school.

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.

CLIL Cascade Network

Laura tells us through the chatbox in this blog about CLIL Cascade Network , a project funded with the support from the European Commission as an activity in the Lifelong Learning Programme. Registration is required in order to access this web contents.

In this page you can find information about some CLIL courses organized by the Summer University of Lapland and the University of Jyväskylä, in cooperation with the CLIL Cascade Network partnership in autumn 2009.

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.

How to make a podcast

Once we have decided to create a podcast, there are different ways and tools we can choose from. These are two simple ideas:


1. Using an online recorder such as Vocaroo or Clear Dropboxes (see gadget below):




2. Using Windows recorder (it creates 'wav' files) or free software such as Audacity. Recordings can be stored in sites such as Goear. Take into account that wav files should be previously converted to mp3 format.

Podcasts

A podcast is an audio or video digital-media file which is distributed over the Internet and can be listened to in portable media players and personal computers. Further information can be read in these Wikipedia entries: in English / in Spanish.

Podacastsinenglish.com is an example of website focused on English learning through podcasts.


This other site collects a series of podcasts recorded by children. The result is an audiobook with a version of Homer's Odyssey in Spanish.

Simpler use of podcasts can be found in blogs. This example of a post in a classroom blog presents students' recordings in Basque about some animal categories.

This video can help us understand the characteristics and uses of podcasts:

Easter

These are some websites containing facts and activities related to Easter:



Topmarks (facts, customs, a 'make a card ' activity and recipes)


DLTK (crafts, games, worksheets, colouring pages...)


The Fun Place (activities, crafts, colouring pages...)


Easter Games and activities (ideas for games, links...)



A short video with pictures related to traditional Easter celebration in the USA.

Source of the picture: www.flickr.com/photos/40221941@N00/449352012

Self-assessment

Self assessment in the Primary classroom of EFL can be approached in a number of ways. Most coursebooks include sheets or boxes at the end of a unit with questions about activity preferences, sense of performace, etc. but their filling can become a kind of meaningless routine for the student. A more intregrated option can be found in portfolios following the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Portfolios foster self-assessment and learning awareness through record sheets, questions or work collection for the dossier. This model of portfolio can be useful with that purpose.

Other resources:
Involving language learners in assessment: a new paradigm (article)

Some examples of self-assessment sheets related to the use of ICT.
Example of a sheet about work on a particular Webquest.

eTwinning

We commented on eTwinning in a previous post in this blog. This service enables teachers to contact with other colleagues around Europe and participate in school projects of different kinds. You can browse through these ideas for inspiration or have a look at the 2008/09 prizes.

Converting text to speech

VozMe is a Google utility that allows converting written texts in English, among other languages, to mp3 sound. Users select between feminine or masculine voice and files can be saved. Although the pace and intonation may sound a bit 'robotic', the pronunciation and stress are good enough.

How to say "coger aúpas"

"Pick me up"

Source of the image: http://www.claudiampublications.com/TheCards/CardPickMeUp.shtml

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.

Fact Monster encyclopedia

Fact Monster site displays a set of resources to look up for information and facts: atlas, dictionary, encyclopedia...

How to say 'espinillera' in English

Spanish: espinillera
Basque: zango-babes, berna-babes
English: Shin guard

Science in English

The website of CEIP ÁNGEL FRIGOLA school contains a set of units which integrate the English and Science curricula. They are aimed at Primary Year 3 students but can be useful at other levels in schools implementing CLIL approaches for the teaching of English.

Karaoke

These are some links to resources related to karaoke materials or teaching ideas:


VanBasco Karaoke Player is free software to play MIDI Karaoke files. Lyrics can be displayed in full-screen. It allows to modify the tempo, volume and key of a song. It requires program installation on the computer.

Karaoke Party allows users to record their performance while reading the lyrics. Access to the computer mike is requested. More information.

The British Council site for English learning resources includes many songs accompanied by pictures, useful for sing-along activities. LearnEnglishKids Songs. Some guidelines and teaching suggestions are given in this handout.

This text gives 10 reasons why to use karaoke in the EFL classroom.

Furthermore, many videos with songs and lyrics can be found on the Internet. Thse are several examples:

A Whole New World (from Aladdin film)

Beauty and the Beast (just lyrics and tune)

All My Loving (Beatles, lyrics and tune)

Rainbow Song

Bilingual Education Platform

Bilingual Education Platform is a social network devoted to the teaching of English with a special focus on CLIL approaches. These are the discussion groups created so far:
- Intercultural Competence
- CLIL & Bilingual Education - Theory & General Issues
- Building CLIL Material: Ideas & Resources
- American & European approach to BE
- CLIL Lesson Planning: SDAIE & AL
- CLIL in Travel & Tourism Education
- Educación Bilingüe en Andalucía
- Teachers' Needs in Language Development
- Curriculum Integrado
- Raising Bilingual Children
- Synthetic Phonics & CLIL