Resources

 

This is an eclectic page, with links to resources I find helpful and links to downloadable materials I have produced.  I hope you find them useful.   For articles I’ve written click on the link Articles and songs. 

If you want to send me feedback or have other links to resources you’d like to see here, I’d love to hear from you. Click here to send email.

British Council E-Merging forum 2012

Back in March 2012 I gave a plenary at the Briticsh Council E-merging Forum in Moscow. It was filmed, and is now available for veiwing: The potential of picturebooks for young learners. The film stops before my concluding remarks … not sure why.

IATEFL EVO 2012

A series of web based seminars organized by IATEFL YLT SIG and TESOL USA.
A wide variety of speakers and well worth spending a couple of hours watching the sessions you find most useful.  Here is the link to the page which shows all the speakers and where you can access links to their webinars.

Realbook News

Real book News is an excellent resource for anyone interested in using picture books in their classrooms.  Originally set up by Opal Dunn, the site is now hosted by the British Council. The site contains reviews of picture book titles from 1997 – 2005, downloadable newsletters and many other links.

Andrew Wright – articles & stories blog/web site

Andrew Wright, ELT author, storyteller, story maker and teacher trainer, has a  blog cum web site with dozens of articles and stories to download.  Well worth a visit.  Here’s the link. 

“Words & Beyond: Exploring Illustrated Children’s Literature in the English Language Classroom”  British Council Seminar, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, February 2009

‘Words and Beyond’ was the third and final seminar in the Animating Literature East Asia Series, organised by the British Council .  The seminar was specifically aimed at exploring the value of both visual and verbal literacy within an intercultural context in the English language classroom. In particular, the aim was to focus on the potential that illustrated children’s literature provides for facilitating inter-cultural understanding, enhancing language learning and developing real life communication skills. The seminar’s objectives were:

• To engage participants with UK children’s writers and illustrators;
• To build an East Asian network for master trainers, teacher educators and policy makers working in the filed of illustrated children’s literature, language, culture and allied disciplines;
• To promote illustrated children’s literature for teaching and learning English and inter-cultural understanding;
• To explore ways to work with illustrated children’s literature in the primary English language classroom;
• To showcase UK and British Council excellence in ELT teaching.

Biographies and abstracts from the seminar can be found here.  With permission from the British Council and the participants, articles written by some of the presenters and materials created by the participants can now be downloaded by following the links below.

Papers from presentations and workshops:

• Picturebooks: what are they? by Sandie Mourão
• Picture power: literacy through critical engagement with visual texts by Maha Sripathy
• Scaffolding children’s learning through story and drama by Carol Read
• War and Conflict: books can help by Janet Evans
• Samsui, Wayang, Rambutans: Using children’s stories to teach heritage and culture by Stephanie Lee-Ling Ho

Picturebook materials produced by participants: 

• Dan’s secret weapon – written by Therese Rea and illustrated by Gary Rees
• Hush! A Thai Lullaby – written and illustrated by Minfong Ho
• My friends – written and illustrated by Taro Gomi
• My Daddy snores – written and illustrated by  Nancy Rothstein
• The great paper caper – written and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers
• The incredible book eating boy – written and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers
• The red tree – written and illustrated by Shaun Tan
• The three questions – written and illustrated by John J. Muth

 

British Council Teaching English ‘Promoting diversity through children’s literature’

Promoting diversity through children’s literature: The British Council Teaching Centre in Paris produces an excellent set of resources for using picture books.  They are all downloadable from the TeachingEnglish website.  The resources are for the following  titles:  Is it because?; Susan Laughs; What if?; Little Beauty; The Very Busy Spider; Tusk Tusk, Rain! and Peas.

British Council Teaching English  ‘Transform’

The Teaching English website is a treasure trove of information, much of which is downloadable.  If you go to the Transform section you will find a number of downloadable books.  Here’s the link.

British Council Teaching English  Think article

I was asked to contribute to a series of articles about using Literature and my contribution, Picturebooks for all can be found here.

British Council IN English Digital E-zine

A newly launched e-zine produced and published by The British Council contains an excellent selection of articles.  It was launched in March 2011 and will be published three times a year.   I contributed to the first issue with an article entitled, Demystifying the picturebook, see pages 11-15.

“Using Literature in EFL Classrooms” – a downloadable book

A book I contributed to called Using Literature in EFL Classrooms and published by APAC, the Catalonian English Teachers’ Association, is also available to download online through the Teaching English site. Click here to download the book.

The Magic Pencil Exhibition

The Magic Pencil exhibition and website celebrated children’s book illustration and brought together the work of 13 illustrators who offered familiar as well as new and varied ways of approaching book illustration. Related to the exhibition a set of materials was created for exploiting picture book covers by Carol Read. Here’s the link

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? 

This is a set of activities which I devised when I first began giving workshops about using picture books. “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?“ by Bill Martin Jr and Eric Carle,  is a wonderful title for teachers who are beginning to use picture books.  I hope you enjoy using the activities too!

– Teachers’ notes
– Mini-cards
– Mini-book

Realbooks! In the primary Classroom – A Cheese and Tomato Spider! 

These activities are part of a book I wrote with Mary Glasgow Scholastic. Here you can download the Content page, Introduction section and Teacher’s notes to use with the picture book ” A Cheese and Tomato Spider” by Nick Sharratt.

Scholastic Books

These activities were devised in 2006 for a Scholastic project I worked on, which eventually fell through.  The  activities have been sitting in my computer ever since.  Nothing better than sharing them!

– Freight Train
– I like it when …
– Water
– From head to toe
– Good night Gorilla!

Penguin Puffin

Penguin Puffin has a downloadable resource book for Penguin Puffin picture book titles. Click here to download the book.

Traditional Portuguese Stories – downloadable materials

In 1999 I worked with a wonderful group of pre-school teachers who wanted to use traditional stories in their classes. The following stories are a result of the fun we had making traditional Portuguese stories fit into our language learning contexts.

– The Little white rabbit
– The beetle story

NOESIS – downloadable materials

NOESIS is a Portuguese journal, published by the Portuguese Ministry of Education.   It contains a pullout section of practical activities and the year that English became an enrichment activity in year 3 & 4 of primary Education coincided with the year they re-launched the journal, so I was asked to write something.  The teacher’s notes are in Portuguese, but the photocopiable activities are easy to use and worth downloading. I can!  came out in Noesis Nº65 Abril / Junho de 2006

E-F@bulations

This is a free online journal based at the University of Porto.  Articles are written in Portuguese and English and one in particular is of interest, written by my colleague Maria Ellison, “Make them think! Using literature in the primary English language classroom to develop critical thinking skills.” It can be directly downloaded here.