Monthly Archives: October 2010

I found this fantastic site that offers free MP3 songs to download.
http://freekidsmusic.com/ Lots of good stuff there. The kids will love it. Some of the pages have the lyrics posted.Very professional productions.

I love these gals. They are from my hometown area in Ohio.
I used to be able to get their stuff free online through Alta Vista.  th_m
http://www.twinsisters.com/

This is a podcast site. It only has one song, but the descriptions he has about the listening activities sound like fun. http://www.englishbanana.com/podcasts.html

Here is one that may be useful. ttp://www.dreamenglish.com/freedownload

If you scroll down and you will find the link to this page. http://www.freeabcsongs.com/ and this page http://www.123listening.com/ I listened to a few short clips. The music and lyrics are slow and pronunciation is clear.

Have you guys seen these videos?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5epPS9O0Mo&NR=1 and this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMcaJy8SH7M

Here is a really adorable video. Quite a bit of choreography went into this production. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1vZijQoMEw

Here is a good one to do with older students. The teacher had the students listen to Yellow Submarine several times and then had them fill out the close activity. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5-Skd6aKs8&feature=related Here is the link to the cloze activity that goes with it. http://www.eoilangreo.net/herminio/online/0809-23.htm There is link to the movie right next to it. 

If you go to  http://www.eoilangreo.net/herminio/online/index.htm you can scroll down and find links to more cloze activities using music.

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Freeology has a bunch of very useful graphic organizers. I use them with my classes all the time. For example, in the curriculum we use (Backpack by Mario Herrera & Diane Pinkley)  there is a 4 page pull out story called Backwards Betty.

Of course, Backpack has some great ideas on how to use the story in the class, like writing Betty’s activities backwards, but I wanted to take it a little farther and give the students a taste of what it is like in a real American school. I went to Freeology and downloaded the 8 event graphic organizer . Then the students had to re-read the story and pick out two events from each paragraph on each page, but first, I made sure to do a before reading activity.

I decided to use the reading short stories chart with a special emphasis on predicting what the story was about just by looking at the pictures. The bottom half asks them about the characters and the setting.

Next, I created a custom graphic organizer. I took short snippets from the story and inserted blank text boxes below, so the students could draw pictures of what Betty should be doing instead.

Finally, the students used the hamburger graphic organizer to create a paragraph based on the pictures they drew. First I modeled how to write the sentences and I scaffolded the sentences for the lower level ESL students by writing starter sentences on the board. At the same time, I introduced the concept of topic sentences which probably should have another post just devoted to that subject.

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