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.