Webwatcher 58

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Russell Stannard recommends some great sites where children can learn vocabulary.


In this issue I want to point out some of the best sites on the internet for children. You can use them in class, if you are lucky enough to have computers for the children to work on. If not, then they are sites that you can recommend the students to use outside class.  

http://www.ur.se/sprk/engelska/index.php  

There are several games on this site, but the one I want to concentrate on is called ‘Decorate’. It is a really fun activity and very simple. Basically, you have to help Roger to decorate his room. Just follow his instructions and click on the correct furniture and the right colours and patterns. This is a very welldesigned game. It is easy to play and has clear learning objectives, yet at the same time it is engaging for students.

http://vocabulary.co.il/index_main.php  

This site has all the standard vocabulary games, such as wordsearches, crosswords and hangman, but there are one or two more which I really like. Try ‘Letter Blocks’. You first click on a letter and then you can click on any of the letters which are adjacent to that letter. The idea is to build a word. To tell the computer you have created a word you simply double click on the last letter and it increases your score. Again, this is really simple but very engaging.  

 http://www.eduplace.com/kids/sv/books/content/wordbuilder

On this site, you can hear sentences being read out and you have to spell a missing word (you are given some help). Once you have spelled the word, you click on it and you will be told if you are correct or incorrect. You then move on to the next sentence. This is well designed in terms of interaction–click ratios: it is important that you don’t have to click needlessly on the screen to make things happen which can quite easily be done automatically by the programme. This site has lots of useful content.  

http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-games-fun.htm

The British Council material is superb. They have invested heavily in the web and there is a lot of fun vocabulary practice on this site. Try ‘Trolley Dash’ – it is addictive! You are given a list of things you have to buy in the supermarket, and you have to ‘run around’, going to the right sections of the supermarket and clicking on the items so that they are added to the shopping trolley. This is enormous fun. You have only one minute to buy everything on the list (you can click the list at any time to remind yourself what you need). I have happily wasted a few hours of my life playing it and have also used it with my students (including adults). Another good game on this site is ‘Clean and Green’. You have to click on objects and put them into the correct recycling bin. There are many other games here, too. For teaching purposes, you will need to spend a bit of time on the site assessing the suitability of the games for your students as the level of the activities jumps around a little, but they are all worth looking at.  

http://www.hello-world.com/English/index.php  

This site has lots of material and you will need a bit of time to look through it. You can easily miss some of the good things as the site is, unfortunately, not that well laid out. A lot of what you find on the opening page is presentation material for colours, numbers, etc, but if you click on ‘Children’s games and activities’, you will find another page full of activities. Try some of the ‘Play Bingo’ games. I did the clothes one. Someone calls out an item and you have a limited time to click on it before another item is read out. The game flows well, it is good for revising vocabulary and there is plenty of content. I like the matching games, too. All the words are read out so that the students are continually hearing the pronunciation of the words while practising them. I tried some of these games out in French (a language I am learning) and I found them pretty useful. You can even play the games in pairs, so you are competing with someone. This can be useful if you are doing them in class. Most of the activities here have a choice of levels, too.  

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks1bitesize  

On this site, the content is not really aimed at ELT students, but I believe that it would work fine with them. Click on ‘literacy’ and then you have a whole host of games to choose from. I have never used this material in class but it looks good. I tried out ‘Rhyming Words’, where you have to select the word that has the same sound as a word the programme reads out for you. All the games are set in nice contexts and there are different levels that you can choose, too. This is well worth looking at.  

http://www.spellingcity.com  

Just one last thing. There is a very good site called ‘Spelling City’. The great thing about this site is that you can enter your own content. You write in the words you want to practise and it makes spelling games out of them. I really like activities where you can control the content because this means you can use them time and time again. This is definitely one to recommend to your students as they can write in words that they continually spell wrong and then practise them. I have created a video to help you with the this site, too. Go to http://trainingvideos.com/spell/index.html.


To make things easier, I have created a free video that takes you through the sites I have written about here and points out some of the games that you can play. There are also some extra sites that I haven’t included in the article, to encourage you to watch the video.  

http://trainingvideos.hscs.wmin.ac.uk/kidsVocab. index.html


Russell Stannard is a principal lecturer at the University of Westminster, UK, where he teaches using technology on multimedia and TESOL courses. He also runs http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com, a website that trains English teachers to use technology.


This article first appeared in English Teaching professional, Issue 58, 2008  


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