A.

The Human Body The human body is a wide-ranging, interesting topic which can be used to

teach not only language skills, but also has cross-curricular links which can be exploited in class. On the LearnEnglish Kids website you can find a variety of materials relating to the human body, covering basic vocabulary teaching, monsters and skeletons, illnesses and amazing facts about the human body. Introducing the topic Parts of the body are fairly easy to teach in class by pointing at the relevant part of the body, but you will find flashcards for all the basic body vocabulary which can be used for presenting and practising vocabulary. Use the flashcards and word cards for matching activities, guessing games, memory games or simple spelling activities. If you have the song Heads, shoulders, knees and toes' you could distribute the flashcards to different students and have them hold up the correct flashcard as they listen to and sing the song before doing the actions themselves. Easy activities for very young learners Activities which are marked with one star only or designated Little Kids' are suitable for very young learners just beginning to learn English. There are two activities based on a clown's face which are very suitable for this level: Labelling the clown's face and the Paint it activity where children listen and read then choose the correct colour for the part of the clown's face. These two activities could provide impetus for a lesson on clown faces. You could ask children to draw their own clown faces and label them in English, or colour in a clown's face from a teacher's colour dictation'. Follow up work could involve writing a few sentences about the clown's face. E.g. His nose is red. He's got green ears. You could ask the children to think of a fun name for their clown.

Another good activity for very young learners is the Scary Skeleton' song. This is a nice catchy tune with repetitive structures and includes only basic body vocabulary. There are several follow-up activities to exploit the song, including a worksheet to label the skeleton a further worksheet labelling an animal skeleton and playing a game making a skeleton by collecting body parts using dice (a kind of Beetle game). If you feel really ambitious or have time at the end of term you could ask your students to make a skeleton using the cut out work sheet. You will need to provide card and paper fasteners for this activity. Alternatively you could set this as a homework activity. Finally for very young learners you could play the Monster game, where children can build their own monster, do a listening activity and have fun with animating it, making it dance, sing or explode! This activity concentrates on colours and basic parts of the body. Children can print their own monsters, or if you don't have this facility in the classroom, ask them to draw their own monster. They could label the parts in English e.g. a green body, red eyes, or you could ask them to write basic sentences such as My monster has got a green body etc. Provide a framework by writing up an example on the board. Extending the topic - further vocabulary and reading If your students are at a slightly higher level you may wish to extend the topic. You could introduce the vocabulary of illness using the visuals on the simple worksheet What's wrong?' Exploit the visuals further by asking individuals or pairs of students to act out one of the illnesses for the other students to guess. This worksheet can also be used as a warmer and lead-in to the story I'm too ill!' as a useful tool for preteaching vocabulary. The story contains repetitive structures and is therefore suitable for lower levels. You could follow up on the mime game above by asking children to act out the story after they have listened to and read the flash version. There is a simple
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follow-up worksheet containing a re-ordering exercise if you wish to consolidate reading. Reading skills can also be developed using the quiz sheets available to download. The simplest of these is the Human Body Quiz. The Multiple choice quiz questions could be prepared in pairs, groups or teams and points awarded for the correct answers during feedback. Adding a competitive element is highly motivating. You will need to explain more difficult vocabulary such as parts of the eyes and internal parts of the body. Use the visuals on the worksheet to help you explain these to students. If you feel ambitious you could try the Brain quiz' or The Senses'. Cross-curricular links The topic of the human body overlaps into other curriculum areas such as Health Education or PSE (Personal and Social Education). If you wish you could use the content of the worksheets on looking after yourself in this kind of lesson. For example, Looking after your body' asks students to make a healthy pizza using vegetables in a fun way. You could ask your students to design their own pizza recipes for a wall display or even make a healthy pizza at home! Use the fitness quiz as a mingle and then develop it into a class survey. Show the results in a diagram on the board or on the wall of your classroom to see how fit and healthy your class is. Extension activities If you have time you could photocopy and enlarge the skeleton template and make a larger version for use in the classroom. You could use this not only to teach parts of the body but as the basis for fun dialogues, oral work, scary stories etc. Children will have a lot of fun thinking of a name for the skeleton! Sue Clarke

B.

The Alphabet The alphabet is one of the fundamental teaching points at primary level

and needs to be frequently recycled and practised using a variety of different activities. On the LearnEnglish Kids website you will find a wide range of activities and materials for teaching and practising the alphabet.. Presenting the alphabet You can use some simple activities and games to familiarise your students with the sounds and letters of the English alphabet. At the simplest level there are two games to practise identifying sounds Sounds Fun where children listen to and click on the right sound, and Alphabet antics, a similar game sounding out the letters of the alphabet. You can also play the game ABC Countdown children must click the letters of the alphabet in order against the clock. Another idea for introducing the alphabet is to use the words and visuals contained in the Picture Dictionary worksheet. Ask children to point to the letters of the alphabet first, then give you the word when you call out a letter. You can then progress to spelling complete words. Spell out a word letter by letter while the children point to it. Write words up on the board and let the children spell them out and draw the right picture on the board next to it. You can then move on to the matching worksheet which accompanies the picture dictionary. You could make picture and /or word cards for more practice. Or you could blow up the visuals and words and put them up on the classroom wall as a reference dictionary for sounds and letters. Another suggestion would be to make mini word and picture cards and ask children to spell them. You could do this individually, or as pair work or make a game with the children working in groups. Or you could use dictation activities. Dictate some of the words from the worksheets letter by letter and ask the children to write them. You can then move on to other familiar vocabulary items or names. You could make a fun game by dictating a short sentence including some of the words on the worksheet e.g. I have a cat and a dog. Dictate letter by letter and ask children to find the word boundaries and tell you the sentence. Children could also dictate simple words to each other.

Spelling races are also very popular. Divide your class into two teams and call out a word from the worksheet. One child from each team should run to the board and write the word. Award a point for the first correct answer. Or have a spelling quiz, asking each team in turn to spell a word. You could also use these visuals to play Alphabet Bingo'. Ask your students to draw a simple grid (or prepare one for them). They should draw or copy six of the worksheet pictures. You can call out whole words or just initial letters of words. e.g. If you shout out A, children cross out apple. Activities for further practice All children love singing the alphabet and you could use the Alphabet song to consolidate. There is also a very nice follow-up worksheet for the song where children identify animals in a jungle picture and make their own animal alphabet. Other worksheets for further practice include an Alphabet crossword which uses the same vocabulary as the dictionary worksheets. In addition, you will find a worksheet for practising sounds and pronunciation in the Alphabet Maze worksheet. For this activity you will need to do some introductory work to familiarise students with the concept of matching sounds which have different spellings. Write some pairs of words from the worksheet on the board randomly e.g. red/head; toes/nose and ask your students to try and pair them up according to sounds. Once they have mastered the idea, you can move on to the worksheet. Extension work/Recycling activities One of the most fun activities on the LearnEnglish Kids website is the Alphabet Zoo story. This is a flash-animated story about a Zorilla with lots of follow-up activities. Play the story a few times and use the downloadable animal flashcards to practise the animals from the story. You will need to do quite a few games and activities with the flashcards to familiarise the students with all the weird and wonderful animal vocabulary! You can find many suggestions for using the ABC flashcards in a separate tips sheet. As follow-up work to the story you could use the worksheet ABC Zoo containing vocabulary matching, quiz and

animal description activities. Or the worksheet ABC animals a cut and stick activity in which children make their own alphabet zoo. Extend this activity by making your own alphabet zoo for the classroom. You will probably need to simplify the list of animals first. Write the letters of the alphabet on the board as a list and ask the children to write in animals for each letter e.g. A = ant, B = Bear, C= Crocodile. Use the bizarre animals from the story to complete all the letters. Make a display for the classroom, allocating one letter/animal to each student and asking them to draw a picture of their animal, label it and write a few simple sentences. Before you put the pictures on the wall ask the students to stand in line with their pictures in the order of the alphabet. There are also some really fun follow-up games for the ABC Zoo story. Try Animal Countdown a game in which children must click on the animals in alphabetical order against the clock. There is also a squash the monkey hangman type game practising the animal vocabulary from the story. Finally there is a gap-filling activity completing information about the Zorilla If your students are at a slightly higher level you could ask them to invent another bizarre animal by mixing two or three animals together, then drawing and writing about their crazy animal. By Sue Clark

C.

Numbers

Easy activities for Very Young Learners With learners who are just beginning to learn English numbers are an essential part of the curriculum. For initial teaching you will find the Balloon Burst game useful. This practises the spellings of numbers 1 - 8. There are also a number of useful worksheets to teach the numbers. These include Numbers 1 - 10 (very simple matching and How many? exercise); a crossword on the Numbers 11 - 20 worksheet and matching and sequencing activities i.e. what's the next number? on the worksheet for 20 -100. These are invaluable for very young

learners and are good reference tools to keep in children's files to check spellings of numbers. Number practice and maths Most children enjoy doing simple maths sums and doing them in a foreign language seems to be more fun! Practise some simple maths on the board and familiarise the students with the terminology of doing maths in English e.g. plus, minus, equals. For easy practice you could use the number wordsearch with maths clues. For practice with harder sums you could try the gapfill game Some simple sums', which practises numbers up to 100.

Developing reading skills There are two stories which practise numbers at different levels of learner. For lower levels you could use the story I couldn't believe my eyes', a very simple story about the Russian circus arriving in town, and ending with a trick question' for the children to type in their answer as a number. The worksheet also has a Magic number trick'. Read the instructions with the class and ask them to think of their own number. Work through the instructions to see if the trick works. After you have done this as a class activities, ask the students to try it in pairs. This also links in very nicely with the Magic Monkey' game where the monkey can read your mind and tell you what magic number you have thought of! A fun and motivating game!

The second story Record Breakers' is for learners at a higher level. Very large numbers are practised in the story as the girl tries to break lots of fun world records. You will need to practise very large numbers before children read the story. Play the story at least twice. During the first listening ask them to remember what the world records are. During the second listening and reading you could ask them to do the matching exercise from the worksheet. The second part of this provides practice in reading and recognising very large numbers. Extend this if you like with further pair work on numbers. Ask each child to write down five very large numbers and then dictate them to his/her partner. This activity is quite fun and children enjoy testing out their partners with the

biggest number possible. This story also contains many superlative structures for describing the world records.

Using the Song The topic also contains a song In My Plane', which shows children how to form the numbers. This is a very useful activity for very young learners who are just learning to write and form letters and learn pencil control. The song contains vocabulary such as down, across, straight line, round, circle. All of these items are quite useful for teacher dictation activities. You could consolidate numbers by asking the children to form the numbers from the instructions - use the worksheet for this. A challenge with numbers At a more difficult level you could use the game Amazing animal facts', which is basically a hangman game on the numbers with clues to r ead about incredible information on animals. This game could be exploited with further incredible facts about animals. The Guinness World Records site (see above) has a really fun section on animals where you could get information, or if students have access to computers they could write their own quiz questions for the class or other students. This would make an excellent end of term quiz activity. Activate the numbers Finally, if your class needs livening up you could try using the Number quiz worksheet with them. You could do the questions as a class survey or you could ask students to work in pairs to complete the questions (the answers are all numbers). As the worksheet progresses questions become more active', until they meet questions such as How many times can you jump up and down in a minute?'. Students could try these activities out and time each other. You will need to make some space in the classroom and perhaps move the furniture. A good fun way to get rid of all the kids' surplus energy!

More number fun! Have fun in your classes with number games. Apart from the traditional bingo games there are many others which practise numbers. Try this simple game. Draw a circle on the board and write numbers randomly inside it. Ask two students to come to the board. Give each one a piece of chalk or a pen. Shout out a number. The first student to cross out the number gets a point. This is an age-old game which still provides lots of fun and motivation - with no preparation for the teacher! By : Sue Clarke D. Food

Introducing the topic/Learning vocabulary You could use the flashcards to introduce the different lexical sets in the topic of food. Make sure you introduce a limited number of items at the beginning (e.g. 10) and then build in revision of these items and extend vocabulary in subsequent lessons. You may wish to add other more culturally common items in the fruit and vegetable lexical sets. Practise vocabulary by playing games with the flashcards. For example, stick ten flashcards randomly on the board. Put your class into two teams and call out sentences about the food you like. (e.g. I like pizza and chips.) One child from each team runs out to the board to touch the correct items. This game is good played with fly-swatters! Skills building For very young learners the song Pizza and Chips' provides very simple lyrics and a catchy tune which is easy to sing. Vocabulary is very limited and also covers days of the week. Use the follow-up worksheet to practise pizza

ingredients. Then ask your students to design their own pizzas using their favourite ingredients. Or ask them to draw a large circle and design a pizza face' and label the ingredients in English. As follow-up work you could ask children to prepare a horrible recipe for a new hippo pie (and send them in to the website!). Or you could ask children to draw a picture/poster of the greedy hippo with all the food it eats, labelled in English, or invent another greedy animal. Cross-curricular work The topic of food has cross-curricular links with health education and you may like to focus on the area of looking after your body, fitness, healthy diet and nutrition. You could use the simple worksheet How healthy are you?' to introduce this topic focus and ask students to complete the questions in pairs or groups before doing class feedback and using the questions as a basis for discussion on what is healthy. Practical activities All children like cooking and learning to cook! Exploit this interest by teaching them some basic cooking vocabulary. Use the visuals to help you. Then move on to some basic recipes. At primary level these must be kept very simple such as the boil an egg' instructions on the worksheet. Complete the recipe together and then mime the actions. Ask your students to join in. Concentrate on teaching imperatives and instructions such as put... take... add... If you feel ambitious you could make something simple to eat in class - for example a fruit salad. Bring in the equipment and the ingredients and ask children to identify words and food items first. Write the steps of the recipe on the board as you do them. For example: 'First, cut up the bananas, apples and oranges etc.' You

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could ask individual students to help you with simple steps such as: put in... add... mix... etc. but take care with knives and sharp objects.

Fun and motivation! Finally you could use the Trolley dash game just to have fun and motivate your students. This is a competitive shop against the clock vocabulary game which children find fun and exciting. You can start at a simple level and move to more difficult ones. Children can compete against each other to see who can shop the fastest. By Sue Clarke

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