Living in Turkey with bilingual English and Turkish kids and being an English teacher, I am often asked for websites to help young learners with their English. The most inspiring project so far this year has been Bubble and Pebble. Bubble and Pebble began life as digital games created by children for children learning English. What is so inspiring is that young kids who are currently learning English have created, animated and dubbed their digital computer games for their peers. The topics covered are colours, clothes, shapes, fruit and numbers. Any parent or teacher could use these to encourage language learning among young children.
To visit the Bubble and Pebble digital game and to read an explanation of the project or even play click here.
Bubble and Pebble has now been developed into a digital story on İtunes. Again this ia created, animated and dubbed by kids. It can be downloaded for free. Click here for the Bubble and Pebble Story
For teachers and parents who want to get creative:
One of the main creators of this project Özge Karaoğlu Ergen was the recipient of CUP-ESU New Writing Award. This award is given to those:
throughout the world who bring fresh and imaginative approaches to the teaching and learning of English.
She teaches English in kindergarden to young learners. To visit her blog for more ideas click here.
For those of you inspired to do something similar with your learners or even children at home then Shelly S. Terrell, also working with young learners created a fantastic resource post called Engaging Learners through Digital Story Telling packed with applications and ideas. Click here.
Shelly and Özge have also been moderating a free course online entitled DigitalStorytelling4Kids. If you click on this link for all the moderators involved you will find each course tutor, their blogs and projects. A great resource for any teacher who wants to get creative.
One of my three year old twins has a fascination with letters and words. One evening or night to be more precise about 6 months ago, after a very long reading fest, he wanted me to read a really long book. I was struggling to keep my eyes open and this was book number 10. It was getting late so I said to him ‘we can read it tomorrow’. He got really frustrated and said, “mummy I want to know the book, you can read but I don’t know how to. I want to read’. I asked him if he wanted me to help him learn to read and he said yes. So we have been trying to learn to read. This week I stumbled across the Ministry of Letters on Twitter which has really excited him.
