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

How to say 'velcro' in English?

Wikipedia provides a quite complete explanation on hook-and-loop fasteners , an everyday object that we usually refer to by its brand name.

This song presents an instance of use for 'velcro fastener'.

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.

Story Place

StoryPlace website contains some stories that can be personalised to some extent by choosing some characters, naming them... Part of the text has to be read and some other parts, especially the characters' dialogues, are heard.

Integrated approach to language teaching

The Education Department of the Junta de Andalucía has recently published a series of documents on a common approach to the teaching of languages at school. They can be downloaded from the following link: Currículo integrado de las lenguas

ESL Video

ESL Video allows registered users to create multiple choice questionnaires ('Questions') related to any video from Youtube or a similar site. This tool gives also the possibility of attaching the written dialogues, lyrics, etc. in the recording soundtrack (Transcript') or adding notes or further open questions ('Notes').

Some teachers have started creating their own but not all of them are complete. Anyway, it is worth browsing through this site for a while and searching for something that could be useful for a particular lesson.

This is an example:

Videos for children

Totlol site displays a collection of videos from Youtube addressed to children. They are categorised according to different criteria such as topic, ranking based on aduts' rating, time of publication...

The Twelve Days of Christmas

Traditional version:


Lyrics

Alternative version with Shrek:

Lyrics

This video contains the same song with pictures which can help students follow the lyrics.

Visual dictionary

Merriam Webster Visual Dictionary Online contains around 6,000 labelled pictures organised in semantic fields such as 'Earth', 'Human Being', Clothing', etc. more thoroughly classified in subcategories within each field. It also provides games for testing word knowledge by labelling the parts of an object and sound to check or learn pronunciation.

FRACTURED FAIRY TALES

"Fractured fairy tales are traditional fairy tales, rearranged to create new plots with fundamentally different meanings or messages. Fractured fairy tales are closely related to fairy‐tale parodies, but the two serve different purposes: parodies mock individual tales and the genre as a whole; fractured fairy tales, with a reforming intent, seek to impart updated social and moral messages". Read full Answers.com entry from this link.

Fractured fairy tales are usually funny and could be used in the English classroom for different purposes, especially with older students in Primary. Although the text difficulty level might be too high, the context is familiar and that helps understanding. Further activities could focus on comparison with the traditional tale or the creation of alternative scenes or endings.

This is an example on video:


And this site contains a collection of written versions.

The following presentation (source http://www.slideshare.net/USAteacher/fractured-fairytale/) gives some basic hints for producing new version of fairy tales:

Fractured Fairytale

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: fractured fairytale)

Calendars

Now that the end of a year is approaching, activities using calendars can be a good idea for introducing or revising dates, days of the week, events, planning work...

These are some webs which offer different resources that could help organise those classroom tasks:

Family Crafts: Free 2009 Printable Calendars

Instructions to organise an activity to design and create Nature calendars.

Big Huge Labs allows to design a month page with the picture you like to add. Once you get the image, click on it to save it into your computer.

Time and Date generates year calendars with mention of the national holidays in different countries.

Advent calendars:

Printable version from The Toy Maker Christmas page: Outside / Inside

Printable templates to create an advent calendar with personalised pictures from Kodak: Front picture / Back template

Online Interactive Advent Calendar

Other miscellaneous resources on Calendarhome.

Source of the image: www.flickr.com/photos/94805433@N00/374317069