Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to anyone who may drop by this blog.

Christmas card on Prezi

Certificate maker

Scholastic has created an online certificate maker to reward students.
Teachers can choose a body, hair, clothes, accessory..., Next they a name and then choose one of these messages:

... is working really hard
... is reading very well
... has made us happy today
... keeps on getting better and better
... is a great person to have in our class

English phonemic chart

Sounds Right is the British Council's first pronunciation chart for learners and teachers of English. Each phonetic symbol is supplemented with examples and audio.

Carol Read's ABC of Teaching English

Carol Read is an expert in teaching English to primary children. Some interesting contributions on issues related this area are beautifully displayed in her blog Carol Read's ABC of Teaching English.

A reading activity on the language of instructions

BBC KS2 Bitesize web site offers a range of online activities to practise English, Maths and science. Click on the picture above to see an exercise aimed at thorough reading of instructions. There are further activities to work on the language of different text types.

British Council wiki

The organizers of the 'British Council Teachers Conference: Celebrating 70 Years of Quality Language Teaching' have created a wiki aimed at collecting information, feedback, resources and links related to the contents of the events held in Bilbao, Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.

Using photography in the classroom

An interesting article on the use of photography to support learning.

Measuring oral production

The Centre international d'études pédagogiques website includes short clips with language learners' oral productions in several languages which illustrate the different competency levels established by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

European Day of Languages

The European Day of Languages has been celebrated every year since 2001 on 26 September at the initiative of the Council of Europe. Its general objectives are alerting the public to the importance of language learning, promoting the rich linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe, and encouraging lifelong language learning in and out of school.

Information about events can be found in this web page.

Writing short stories

Petites històries web site offers sets of 3, 6 or 9 pictures related to a topic (e.g. cats, images for fairy tales such as "The Emperor's New Clothes"...) that can be arranged in the desired order and suplemented with text. The outcome can be printed out or recorded.

Habitats and animal classification

Thanks to English at Intxaurrondo Hegoa School blog, I've come across some useful and amusing online activities to practise animal classification and animal names related to different habitats.

African Savannah

African River

North American Forests

Backyard Animals

All of them are part of Sheppard Software website, a site with a good number of resources useful for CLIL lessons especially.

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.

Benchmarking CLIL

BeCLIL website presents and contains the outcomes of a European Comenius project carried out between 2004 and 2007. Its main objective was to identify good practice in CLIL classrooms in order to provide teachers -or other people involved in language learning through content areas- with hints and ideas to improve their teaching.

LearnEnglishKids

The British Council's website for young learners of English, LearnEnglish Kids, has a new layout providing easier access to its sections and introducing some new features. It also includes direct links to TeachingEnglish and LearnEnglish (aimed at teenager and adult learners)

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.

Learning on the Move

Learning on the move (British Council resource) collects a set of activities such as comprehension games, stories, phoneme recognition activities...
Another useful tool from the British Council is this Phonemic Chart where symbols can be associated to good patterns of articulation.

A good collection of links to websites related to primary school subjects

Coxhoe Primary School website displays selections of interesting websites related to a good number of curriculum subjects. Some resources can be useful if working through projects or in a CLIL approach.

Language of the Month

Teachers and students at Newbury Park Primary School in Ilford carry out a project called 'Language of the Month’ to celebrate the different language backgrounds of its pupils. The scheme introduces everyone to some of the 40 languages spoken in the school community.

Turtle, tortoise, or terrapin?

From Wikipedia:

"Although the word turtle is widely used to describe all members of the order Testudines, it is also common to see certain members described as terrapins, tortoises or sea turtles as well. Precisely how these alternative names are used, if at all, depends on the type of English being used.

• British English normally describes these reptiles as turtles if they live in the sea; terrapins if they live in fresh or brackish water; or tortoises if they live on land. However, there are exceptions to this where American or Australian common names are in wide use, as with the Fly River turtle.
• American English tends to use the word turtle for all freshwater species, as well as for certain land-dwelling species (e.g. box turtles). Oceanic species are usually referred to as sea turtles, and tortoise is restricted to members of the true tortoise family, Testudinidae. The name terrapin is typically reserved only for the brackish water diamondback terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin; the word terrapin being derived from the Algonquian word for this animal.^[11]
• Australian English uses turtle for both the marine and freshwater species but tortoise for the terrestrial species."

Online stories

Els contes del Tom i la Laia is a collection of six online stories in English, which can be read and listened to. They are supplemented with activities.

Searching the web for particular types of documents

Juhuj is a search engine that allows refining our quest according to the type of file we are interested in. It can be useful when we are looking for presentations related to a topic, we prefer a Word document in order to edit it easily, etc.

Webquests

From this Matrix of Webquests we have access to some webquests in English that could give us ideas for designing projects.

Online dictionaries

Browsing through some classroom blogs related to EFL in Primary, in Blogging in Arteixo I've come across a reference to these two visual dictionaries:

- Sashi, a visual dictionary that combines Wiktionary content with Flickr images.
- Moving into English e-Glossary, a collection of terms with definitions, pictures and sentences managed by Hartcourtschool Publishers.

Moreover, the following resource is also mentioned: Howjsay, a practical pronouncing dictionary.

Some CLIL tasks designed by teacher trainee students

This wiki collects some tasks designed by teacher trainees as part of their course assignments.

Activities related to different subjects

This webpage from the Utah Education Network site gives access to several sets of activities, some of which could be useful when working through CLIL projects.

Activities and facts about bugs

Zoom in on True Bugs website includes a glossary, information and an online activity to classify some invertebrates.

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.