Merry Christmas!!!

Using Cartoons to Teach English

Yesterday, I came across the children's section of  RTVE's website, the Spanish Radio and Television broadcasting company.

Of course, it is full of videos of TV series for children and pre-teens, in Spanish… and in English!

So, since Christmas is around the corner and our little kids will spend a great amount of time watching cartoons anyway, why not to make the most of it?

There are series for each and every level of English: from PocoYo to SpongeBob SquarePants, passing through Peppa Pig, Dora the Explorer, Baby Looney, Pokémon, Scooby Doo and many, many more.

The project is supported by the British Council that has prepared some parents' guides that analyze the type of language, the grammar and vocabulary, common words and phrases used in each cartoon.

Don't even think about parking your child alone on the sofa watching TV in English and expecting him to learn it!

It won't work at all. 

I'll explain to you why in my book Mi Hijo Habla Inglés - Consejos Para Padres 

Fortunately the British Council people are wise and they have prepared a list of tips that you can follow for helping your child fully understand every episode.

Don't miss them!

Quieres leer este post en español? Ve a mi otra página!

Road Safety Explained to Children

Today I'm going to tell you about Road Safety for children.

Fundación MAPFRE has 3 web pages dedicated to road safety web pages: 2 of them are for children, aged 3 to 5, and 6 to11, and one is for their teachers.

In the children's ones there are videos, games, activities and books which will teach children about street signs, safety behaviours and what's proper to do when they are living those typical situations like cycling, crossing the street, etc.

They will help children to develop a critical mind about what the right or wrong things to do on the street are.

You can also introduce this topic in English thanks to a couple of English books especially designed for the two age groups.

In Mario's Jungle we follow this little guy and his mother along the sidewalks of their city. The street looks like a jungle and cars and motorbikes are like dangerous noisy wild animals which scare little Mario. Fortunately he knows that nothing bad will happen to him if he crosses the street at black and white stripes that look like zebras or if he waits for the green man to show up on the traffic lights.

This book can be easily adapted for some role-play game.

The other book, Julia, Penguin and the Spy, is a little longer and more complex, because it is for children who are already attending primary school.

Julia is walking her dog, Penguin, but at one point she realizes that a suspicious man is following her. She carries on walking the dog, she meets some friends who are not very concerned about road safety and she has to remind them what's the right thing to do on the street. 

In the meantime, the weird man is still there lurking, so she pops into a café to call her mum for help.

When her mum resolutely approaches the man to ask him why he  was following her daughter we discover that Julia has just won a prize for having strictly followed the road safety rules and for even having helped adults follow them.

In my opinion, all these websites are really useful tools to teach children about the safety on the street, especially because they are definitely designed according to their specific knowledge and skills.

Don't miss them!

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Are you looking for more children's books? Visit the section Children's books on this same blog.

Science For Children - A Good Alternative to Textbooks

Here in Spain, Science as a subject taught in English has been recently introduced and it is compulsory for those students who attend bilingual schools.

The collection Pinch of Salt published by Anaya is a little bit different from the text books I usually see around.

Scientific phenomena such as reflection and refraction of light, landscape transformation, energy sources and the circulatory system are explained through story which are narrated by several characters through their adventures and discoveries.

The stories are illustrated and really creative. They are adapted to the English curriculum, so the grammar and the vocabulary will be specific for a school year which is also suggested on the books' cover.

They are also perfect for a shared project: the English teacher could deal with the linguistic part of the reading while the science teacher could focus on the scientific part.

Each book comes with a CD and at the end of the story there are 'work cards' with experiments, questions and all sort of activities that will awake your students' curiosity about the world that surrounds them.

At the moment you can purchase 4 titles and their respective teacher's books:

The Heart Cave: A "pirate school" ship takes the reader into a cave which seems to work like a human heart. Following the crew your students will discover what its secrets are and why it can produce so many precious stones!

The Rock Eating Monster: A Sc-Fi story whose protagonist is Lucas, a space superhero, who is captured by a very bad wizard, Noir. To get free, Lucas will have to discover what has happened to the landscape around him while he was asleep because of a curse Noir has put on him.

The Steam Castle: There's a magical kingdom, Occam, where a princess, Enid, wants to convert her castle into a mobile one. To achieve her purpose she will have to travel to the world of humans to meet the former wizard of Occam who, in the meantime has become a scientist. Will they be able to create the energy sources they need to transform Enid's castle?

The Rainbow Party: Enid from Occam is preparing a birthday party for her father, the King. She wants to use the light and all its natural special effects to amuse him but once again she will need some help from humans and their science.

Personally I think that these books are definitely at a higher level compared to the science books used in the Spanish bilingual school system. However, the narrative style is quite far away from Roald Dahl's and the fact that scientific explanations are concentrated in a few pages sometimes creates the same state of confusion as a traditional science book. In any case, this is natural when you consider the complexity of the topics treated in the books.

I've personally never been able to remember a physics definition or formula for more than a few days because of this density of concepts--when I was in school I found it difficult to remember the mathematical side of science for the same reasons.

But the work cards will certainly help. Students will be able to experiment and make their own predictions and observations of any statement presented, adding practical experience to the theoretical one. 

And that's exactly what science is for and why I definitely love it!

  

This collection will be a good choice if you aren't satisfied with the current method of teaching this subject, that most of the time requires just learning by heart, when  you'd like your students to experience how science really works, through active thinking and learning. 

Also Available in Spanish.

           

Lesson Plan: Gingerbread Cookies... or Another Way To Impress Your Students

Run, run! As fast as you can! You can't catch me 'cause I'm the Gingerbread man!

Autumn has definitely snuck into our lives here in Madrid. It's cold and rainy, and I've already got a cold.

So, since it'll be impossible to go out to enjoy the rejuvenating Sierra of Madrid, I've decided that TODAY IS THE DAY! 

Time for some baking!

And, since I've already ordered my copy of the book The Gingerbread Boy on Amazon, I decided, in order to make the story and the experience unforgettable, that my students will also receive a couple of Gingerbread cookies. 

I will probably prepare a simple activity about 'the family', like the one presented on my previous post about Gingerbread People, to keep adding to the story.

But, the best part is going to be singing the chorus of  this really catchy song  while reading the book.

I can't stop singing it! 

If you decide to bake with your kids the RECIPE is HERE!

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¡Ayuda a tu hijo a aprender inglés!

Acabo de abrir un nuevo blog dedicado a los padres que hablan español y que quieren que sus hijos aprendan inglés.

https://misslucysteachingfun.wordpress.com/

Allí escribiré, en español, sobre cómo los niños aprenden inglés y lo que hace falta para ayudarles.

Si tienes dudas sobre como enfrentarte a la tarea de enseñar inglés a tu hijo y cómo ayudarle para que el aprendizaje sea ameno y efectivo...

¡No te lo pierdas!

How to teach BEHIND and IN FRONT OF to pre-school kids

Teaching preschoolers is challenging. They can't read or write and their attention spam is directly connected to the interest they feel for what you're trying to teach them.

This month I've been teaching prepositions of place. 

If, on the one hand, ON and UNDER have been assimilated quite quickly, because, I think, they're just one-word prepositions, on the other hand, it looked that BEHIND and IN FRONT OF were more difficult to be learnt.

Till I got inspired by a picture I saw in an English book for children. It was a pre-drawn wood with monkeys hiding behind trees or placed in front of them.

What I did to make it more interesting was to paint trees on a piece of paper and use some stickers, colorful cats, to repeat the exercise.

The kids had to place whole cats IN FRONT OF the trees and cut those cats that they wanted to place behind the trees, to give the impression that they were hiding.

You can see the result in the picture. 

Lovely, isn't it?

Then I asked them to count how many cats were hiding and how many cats weren't, just to review numbers.

Of course, you can draw a different landscape according to the stickers you have at home.

Have fun!

Quieres leer esta entrada en español? Aquí la tienes!