Bow Wow Meow! Animal Sounds in Different Countries

I found a fun video today on Vimeo called Bow Wow Meow!  It features people saying animal sounds in 17 different languages. The languages are English, Mandarin, French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Hindi, Canadian-French, Romanian, Japanese, Russian, Dutch, Bengali, Brazilian-Portuguese, Colombian-Spanish, Swahili and Mongolian.   The one sound that seems to have the most commonality is the sound of a cat.  Most of the languages sound similar to our English "meow".  The other animals are dog, rooster, cow and pig.

I think this would be a great video to show students and then do a writing project on it.  I could see making our own video with our iPads, too.  Our ELL's include students who represent at least 9 different languages.  
What fun and it could be a great way to include some of our ELL parents, too! !

Here's the link to Bow Wow Meow on Vimeo.  (Note:  Be patient.  It took a while for it to download and buffer before I could watch it on my computer.) 

Clothing and ELF Learning Videos

I like using videos when I teach.  With English Language Learners it helps to show students pictures, especially with vocabulary work.  Recently, I discovered ELF Learning.  They have some great videos posted on their ELFTube and also YouTube.

(Additional note on Jan. 11, 2012:  If you want to join the ELF website "community", you need to use a different web browser than Internet Explorer.  I used Google Chrome at home.  Internet Explorer would NOT work for me at home last week nor for Mrs. Pokey at school today. If you don't care about joining the "community",  just access the  ELF videos through YouTube.)

This week, I started a clothing vocabulary unit with my Kindergarten and first grade students.  I created an assessment using photographs from the Internet.  (Google Images is a useful tool for finding appropriate pictures.) Then, I pre-assessed the students' knowledge of 23 clothing words and will post-test them with the same assessment at the end of the unit.

ELF Learning has three very nice videos on Clothing.  Here is the first one.

The first one is a simple flash card type presentation of 24 clothing words. (The only one I didn't use in my assessment was "rain boots".  It seemed redundant to me to talk about "boots" and "rain boots".)  The other two videos use the same vocabulary words but add sentences and phrases.

Clothing flashcards, words are repeated


My Clothes 1 with sentences and phrases


My Clothes 2 with sentences and phrases


Good luck!  My students really are enjoying these videos.  I hope your students do, too.

SchoolTube and Sight Words

Yesterday, we had a district technology expert spend the day with us.  She camped out in our computer lab and we had the opportunity to work with her during our planning periods on our school web pages.  The district provides a basic template we have to use for our web pages, but it's not terribly attractive, in my opinion.  Since I had started my web page early in the the school year, I worked with her on how to improve the appearance of my page.  My planning time is pretty scattered, so I started the day in the lab, spent about 20 minutes, popped back in again during lunch and then at then end of the day. 

While I had the technology expert there, I picked her brain about my sight word powerpoints and how I could get them to work for every child.  We discussed several ideas including putting together a YouTube channel.  I thought about it for a while and decided I didn't necessarily want my little ones on YouTube unattended.  There are some very good educational videos on there, but there is also a LOT of items NOT appropriate for children.  I shared my concerns with the expert. She listened and agreed. While I taught my classes, she did some investigating and when I returned at the end of the day, she showed me SchoolTube.   I had seen TeacherTube before, but wasn't familiar with SchoolTube.  She found some ESL sight words presentations posted there and shared them with me. 

The district expert and I want to work together (with any other district ESL teachers who might be interested) and create our own district SchoolTube channel where we can post our own videos and presentations.  Woooo-hooo!  It should be fun!