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An Advanced ESL Listening comprehension activity.

Multicultural Education through Miniatures includes photos, maps, stories, and games of handmade dolls and puppets from all over the world. This website can increase global awareness for children and adults. Explore by clicking Select a Photo, See Entire List, or Click a Map. Cultural games are also available at Go to Activity. Students and teachers can use the pictures, stories, and games for educational purposes. No commercial use may be made of the contents of this site.

Learn how copyright issues affected Sieglinde Schoen Smith's new book, based on her interpretation of a 1906 German children's book of the same title. One of the 2008 Growing Good Kids (sm) Excellence in Children's LIterature award; connected to the Junior Master Gardner Program and the American Horticulture Society.

I work with adult migrants and they live with their non-English speaking families. Therefore, unlike children of native English speaking families, these adults are not surrounded by rich English words that are full of meaning. We might say to a child "put your toys away" and they won't understand, so we do it for them. However, we started doing it when they were 8 months old, and after a few more months, they understand what it means.

"MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." Astonishing, data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn. About Deb Roy Deb Roy studies how children learn language, and designs machines that learn to communicate in human-like ways. On sabbatical from MIT Media Lab, he's working with the AI company Bluefin Labs"

Learn English Kids is a great collection of resources from the British Council for children learning English as an additional language. Play games, listen and watch stories and learn songs. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English+As+An+Additional+Language

I have found that the "Sharing to Grow" concept is always a lot harder to sell to colleagues than expected.Teaching is after all an essentially individual activity-it is about you and 30 children, isn't it? As we all know, it is and it isn't. As an individual activity, it is easy to rely on habit, recycling activities that we feel work in the classroom. However, with educational technology developing at high speed, the life-cycle of classroom activities seems to be getting shorter and shorter, with more and more needed to get that "wow factor" out of classes. This is when...

Overweight is taking a heavy toll on people's health and the economy. Health Promotion Switzerland focus on activities that will increase the number of people with healthy weight. Core target groups are children and adolescents. In cooperation with cantons and other partners, the strategic area «Healthy Weight» will implement policies to halt the trend towards more and more overweight people. Most information in French and German

Free public service to motivate children to read with phonics.

A useful site that allows users to dictate and generate text. A great resource for children with writing difficulties to get their ideas written quickly. It works with a range of languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and more. For mistakes, the site offers alternative words with similar pronunciation. Only works with Chrome. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

""Lab pe aati hai dua" ("Chlid's prayer"), on a poem by Allama Iqbal, the great Urdu and Persian poet (1977-1938 - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Iqbal ). It is sung here by Siza Roy and a chorus of school children, Label: Saregama Distribution: The Orchard - see http://www.theorchard.com/dist/releaseInfo.php?upc=829410800501. Thanks to the Orchard for having removed the ads that were first automatically added to this video. NOTE I don't know Urdu, so I copied the words from "dua (prayer) - Lab pe aati hai dua... " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvBd_F-Fn3w . one of the several open-captioned videos on this poem. Then I used them to produce the dynamic subtitles in Open Captioning with TunePrompter (Mac version: http://tuneprompter.en.softonic.com/mac ). Exporting the video produced the credits in the first seconds of the video."

"It is often claimed that people who are bilingual are better than monolinguals at learning languages. Now, the first study to examine bilingual and monolingual brains as they learn an additional language offers new evidence that supports this hypothesis, researchers say. The study, conducted at Georgetown University Medical Center and published in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, suggests that early bilingualism helps with learning languages later in life."

"A strategy to support pupils improve their spelling strategies, by circling words which they think require attention. The Standards & Testing Agency have in some ways made the marking of spellings more problematic than it's ever been. They state quite clearly, that individual spellings should no longer be pointed out to children if you wish to mark it as an independent piece. This, coupled with Ofsted's move away from heavy amounts of marking needing to be seen in books, could make the marking of spelling seem tricky."

"Second-grade students who read aloud to dogs in an after-school program demonstrated improved attitudes about reading, according to researchers at Tufts Institute for Human-Animal Interaction at Tufts University. Their research appears online in advance of print in the Early Childhood Education Journal. Reading skills are often associated with improved academic performance and positive attitudes about school in children. Researchers wanted to learn if animal-assisted intervention in the form of reading aloud to dogs in a classroom setting could contribute to improved skills and attitudes."

"Writing is vital to most examples of learning. It is how civilisation conveys information from generation to generation, it is how parents often communicate their needs and fears for their children as notes to the teacher, and it is how little Johnny/Jane tells you about what their cat and/or dog did at the weekend. Some people love writing, while others struggle with it, but everyone has to write to some degree in their daily lives, and all of this stems from their experiences in the classroom."