Monday, 14 January 2013

LearnEnglish Kids


LearnEnglish Kids is the British Council's website for children around the world who are learning English as a second or foreign language. This site has free resources for children to use at home, either independently or with family members or friends. You can recommend activities from this site to children to do for homework, or during school holidays. You can also recommend the Parents section of LearnEnglish Kids to parents and carers of children.

What you just read is the introduction of the Teachers page of the British Council's website for children who are learning the English. The website offers many different ways to help those children in their learning, both in school and at home. I'll present the different categories of activities that can be found.

Kids games
This section offers games where the children can practice certain language skills while having fun. The games are divided into five different groups; fun games, learn words, find words, play with words, and spell words. As the five categories suggest, many of the games can be used to learn new words and how they are spelled. They can also be used to practice the structure of sentences and the children's understanding of instructions in English. This can be done at different level of difficulty, for example by matching words with a corresponding pictures, playing Hangman, answering quiz questions or placing given words in the correct order. The games are not only made with different difficulties, but also with different themes or subjects of interest such as days and months, animals, and sports.

Listen & watch
This section contains the four categories songs, short stories, kids news and tongue twisters. All four categories offers animated videos for children to watch and listen to and thereby practice their listening skills. The videos covers many different themes and subjects of interest for children at different levels of knowledge in the English language. As it is written on the teacher's page, there are free worksheets to download and use in the classroom connected to many of the videos.

Read & write
In this section, you can find worksheets to practice the children's writing and reading skills. Those worksheets are free to download and use in the classroom.

There is a link to a sub-page called 'word of the week' where different words are being taught by written sentences where the words are used, and thereby explains the words. Every word comes with a video where children who speaks different accents says the word and the written sentence mentioned before. The section does also offer the children to write texts within different topics and send their writings as a contribution to the web-site.

Make
This section gives the children opportunities to create things, both online and with their hands. There are categories as 'story maker', 'style a hero', and 'comic strip maker' online. There are arts and crafts worksheets to download and use in the classroom. These worksheets have instructions of how the make different things such as 'a spring hat', 'Little Red Riding Hood finger puppets' and 'animal masks'. Every activity comes with a video of a child who are showing and telling how to make the different artworks.

Speak & spell
The super space spies Sam and Pam want to learn to speak and spell English, and they want children to learn with them. There are four sub-categories where Sam and Pam listen to sounds, learn to speak, learn spelling rules and learn to spell tricky words through worksheets and weekly spelling tests.

Grammar
The young learners of English are given help to learn grammar rules through games, quizzes, videos, worksheets, and tests.

Little kids
This section offers activities for pre-school teachers, parents of very young children and older siblings who wants to teach these children English. There are games, word games, songs, stories, crafts, and Let's go Pocoyo where the children can learn English with Pocoyo.

Others
Except from all the activities for children that can be used either in school or at home that I have written about above, there is a parent's page where parents are given ideas of how to help their children to learn English. All the activities their children have access to are easily found here, as well as a list of websites with more online resources.

To access everything on the website, children, teachers and parents need to have an account to log onto. You need to log on to access the worksheets.

Except from the LearnEnglish Kids, there is also LearnEnglish Teens and LearnEnglish adapted for adult learners. There's a TeachingEnglish section available as well.


LearnEnglish Kids:

The LearnEnglish Teacher's website:

/Therese

1 comment:

  1. Hi Therese!

    I found it very interesting to read about your website Learn English Kids. I have never heard about it before. It is always nice to get tips on new sites or new ideas. Learn English Kids seems to be a serious site because it is the British council who has made it.
    When I looked at site, I found a lot of interesting things to do. I didn´t like all the exercises, but most of them were really good. The page is full of color, which I think many children will like. One of the best things is that you can use it both in school and at home. The page contains such a variety of exercises and things to do. I especially liked the short films. They were just the right length and with native speakers (I think). I am sure that I will use this site in my own lessons. I will also write in my weekly letter and recommend the parents that they can look at this side at home.
    I liked that you wrote a little about every part that is on the webpage, because you woke my interest for it, before I have seen it.
    A small suggestion is that I would have liked you to write if you have a favorite part on the pages or if you have tried it in your class and what your students thought about it. It would also be interesting if you had found any downsides with the website.
    Thank you for given me this great tip of a useful website.

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