Learn English Kids!

I have found the site Learn English kids on the Internet. You can find the site here :


http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/


I think this is a page that you can use a lot when you are teaching English to young kids . The site is built up to be used for second language acquisition and teaching. It´s a good site for teachers, students and parents to work with. To be able to use all of the functions on the website you have to start a charge free account on the site. It is also good if you have a flash player installed on the computer; it is often pre- programmed on new computers. As a teacher it can benefit the teaching if you have a Clever board or a projector in the classroom so you in a easy way can show the students how the page or task works. After starting an account it´s just to surf out and use all the good exercises.


On the site there are five headlines games, listen & watch, read & write, make and speak & spell. Under every headline there are hundreds of exercises to listen to or do. For many for the exercises there are discussion questions or examples of how you can work more with the exercise.
Under the headline games you can find good games that help the child to develop their language. One example is a game there the child shall label the furniture in the bedroom. Under listen & watch you find example of kids that tells stories, different songs, movies and so on. Read & write headline collect the exercises that help the children to develop their reading and writing skills. An example of a task called "your turn". In this task the child get a question and shall answer it in writing. A story maker is an example of what you can find under the headline make, it´s an easy tool to make a short story. This is a good tool for enlargement of the vocabulary. Under the headline Speak & spell you can follow Sam and Pam and training pronunciation through songs, games and action.

As a teacher there are many possibilities to use the tasks on the website. The tasks are not connected to the syllabus or the curriculum but most of the exercises match the Swedish syllabus in some way. One way you can work with the site is to give an exercise as homework to the students. You can find good exercises about furniture´s were the students are supposed to know the name and were the furniture goes. This is also a good site to listen to authentic English but you have to listen to the video before showing it for the children so you can prepare the children in advance so they understand the words in the text.


Something that is important to think about before you start to use the site is way you use the exercise, dose it fit your purpose? It´s a good site but it is easy to get carried away of all good exercises. Remember it have to be in a meaningful content for the students.


A problem with the site is that it can be hard to find an exercise again. There are not possibilities to make an exercise a favourite, so to find the same Halloween exercise the next year can be very hard. So if you find an exercise that you like try to save it on your hard drive or print it out!


//Maria Skanbäck