Learn English Kids is the British council website for children who wants to learn English. It's free and the children can use it at home or in school. When children are at home they can work together with friends or parents and choose the exercise they like to work with. Perhaps children have a homework or need to practise in Learn English Kids to be better on listening in English. At home they can help each other. You can become a member as a kid, a parent or a teacher. That's gives you some benefits e.g. download learning resources, answer questions and enter competitions. To use Learn English Kids at home you need a computer with internet connection. In school you also need a projector and an interactive whiteboard for best result.
The link is: http://britishcouncil.org/learnenglishkids
Learn English Kids is divided in five sections.
In the games section you can play different games and practise your spelling and vocabulary in a fun way.
In the listen and watch section you can listen to stories, songs and watch videos of English children who are talking about their lives and news. You can also practise your pronunciation when you listen to and say tongue twisters.
In the read and write section you practise your reading and writing skills. Every week English kids give you a new word to work with, in the exercise "Word of the week".
In the make section you practise your English as you create and make stories and things.
In the explore section you can get tips from children how to learn English, you get links (to explore the web) for English learning and you can answer questions in polls.
How the resource can be used by teachers: Teachers can find exercises that ties in what they are working with in their text-and workbook. They can search for a special topic, level and age and get exercises in that topic from different sections and worksheets. You can e.g. show the short story "What will I be when I grow up?" in full screen on the whiteboard and look as many times as you want. After you have seen the story with flash player plug in, in web browser, pupils can do the worksheets. The teacher also gets a number of questions about jobs (below the exercise) to ask the pupils. Teachers can positively recommend this website to pupils and their parents to use at home. When teacher use Learn English Kids the pupils get an opportunity to meet English kids who are talking and they gain insight into their lives. It's so easy to invite English children into the classroom!
Why is Learn English Kids good for learning English?
It's free
It's easy to use in the class when you have a projector, interactive whiteboard and an enough new computer.
It contains exercises which are fun, nice-looking and adapted to practise the skills in English to reach the goals for the syllabus in English.
First of all I must say that I like the layout of this website. The colors are nice and there are a lot of pictures that are both cute and funny. The first impression is good and I think most children will be interested when they see this site. Perhaps some of my students in year six would regard the layout a little bit childish.
ReplyDeleteI like that this website deals with the basic skills of reading, writing and listening since they are really important in our new syllabus. With the help of an interactive whiteboard you could easily chose an exercise and do it in your class. If I could ask for something more I would like some more suggestions on good speaking activities.
Another thing that I like with this website is that it can be used by parents. A lot of parents want to help their children but they don´t know how to do it. On this website parents can get helpful tips from experts on how to help their children the best way possible. They can read useful articles and discuss many different topics in the forum.
Right now we are working with animals in my class and I think I could get some nice ideas from this site. Of course you don´t have to do everything but I’m sure you´ll find some goodies. It is great that you can navigate between different topics in an easy way. You save a lot of time because you don´t have to search the entire website to find what you are looking for.
I think that a teacher could use this site in many ways. You can feel safe using it because the persons behind it work with children who are learning English. I will definitely come back to this website in the future!!
//Magnus Nilsson
I agree with Magnus in many things. At first this webbsite looked childish to my students in year six. But I have used it a few times and they realy liked it. The things they like the most is the story maker. I let them make a story and then they read it to a friend. Then, they ask each other things about the text.If they want to they can read it to the whole class.
ReplyDeleteThis website is very useful.I don´t know if I should involve the parents. Maybe in the future.One more thing that is good with this website is that you can receive their newsletter by mail and you can follow them on Facebook. This makes it easy and convenient to be updated about what is available to use.Although the page is good, I think I will use it more next year when I have students in 4th grade than I do now. I will try to use this with my interactiv whiteboard and I think I can find more fun things to do with this site in my class. // Ida Eriksson
I really like this site too, mainly because it is easy to navigate and there are no commercials but also because there are many nice exercises! I like the layout as well, it’s colourful but it doesn’t “jump on you”. From what I have seen so far I think that younger children will enjoy this website more but there are absolutely exercises that suits older pupils as well, for example the quizzes.
ReplyDeleteI have used it as introduction to different topics and for repetition and I’ve used a quiz in my class 5-6 when we talked about Halloween.
When we first were to make a blog post I thought that I was going to write about this website as well. Then when I saw your blog post I chose something else so we should get many different websites to read about.
ReplyDeleteI really like British Council Learn English Kids. The page looks so inviting with all the colours and pictures and you just want to start exploring. It is easy to navigate and you can find lots of things to do with your pupils. My pupils in class 4 like it and they can work on their own because it is easy to find games and exercises.
Both teachers and parents have good use of this website and it is nice to be spared from all the commercials.
The search function is good if you want to find something special. If you are new on this website you can get really good help from the "Explore" section. I think this is one of the best websites you can find when you are teaching or learning English in the lower classes. // Anna-Maria Svensson