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.