Interactive activities to work on the geography of Europe

Toporopa web site presents a set of interactive activies to learn or revise geographical data of Europe. Although most of the contents are more appropriate for Secondary students, some primary students may find it challenging to try Countries of Europe or Flags of Europe, for instance.

"eTwinning Tourists in 5 star hotels" project

eTwinning tourists in 5 star hotels is a project carried out by schools from three countries. Students are organised in five teams of mixed nationality pupils and work on EFL and CLIL contents through a set of activities. This is an outline of the process:

- Each team is the staff of a hotel chain.
- The teachers are the inspectors and propose games, tasks and activities along the year. These activities are awarded with stars. The hotel chain (team) that first gets 5 stars for their hotels is the winner.
- Each team designs a brochure for their hotels.
- Each child makes a puppet, which will be their tourist. “The tourists” will look at the brochures and make a room reservation. Then the tourists (puppets) are posted out to visit the other countries.
- Each hotel chain makes a picture show of the tourists’ visit and gives them a souvenir to take home after their travels.
- The project ends with a virtual party (on Skype) where the winners will be announced.

e-cultural Kaleidoscope

e-cultural Kaleidoscope is the name of an eTwinning project based on the exchange of information about traditions, greetings, recipes, and some other issues. It also includes communication on a common task: making kaleidoscopes.

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 

CLIL units

The Catalan Department of Education has fostered the creation of CLIL units throughout the last years. Resources related to this task carried out by primary and secondary teachers of English can be seen and downloaded from this link.

A CLIL project

Teachers from Escola Maria Osso in Sitges explain their CLIL project in primary education. They reinforce English teaching through maths and science. A video and specifications on the project can be accessed from here.

An online activity to practise numeracy skills

Ann and Addem's Dartboard Game allows children to reinforce oral identification of numbers while practising mental arithmetic.

CLIL resources

The Andalusian educational authorities have just published on the Internet a set of teaching units aimed at working on different topics from different subjects in English.

Several activities created with LIM

LIM (Libros Interactivos Multimedia) is a free authoring tool that allows the creation of activities for the classroom. Some teachers of English have shared their outcomes in this webpage.

Example: INVERTEBRATES

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.

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.

Webquests

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

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.

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)

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.