Appy Advent – Activities for Advent Time (Week 4)

/ Lesson tips, Students, Teachers, Young Learners

This is the final week of ELT-Tutor’s Appy Advent Scratch Challenge (See the Advent Calendar here). For another 7+2 days, you can discover a new animation, quiz or game, you can explore the code inside and create your own version with a video tutorial (if there is something new to learn) or an ‘edit’ version of the code (to put into the correct sequence and/or complete). Scratch is free online app (available also for download) created for kids to learn the basics of coding: algorithm, sequences, repetition, variables, etc. It’s a visual platform, so instead of memorizing code strings, kids

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Appy Advent – Activities for Advent Time (Week 3)

/ Lesson tips, Students, Teachers, Young Learners

Welcome to the third week of ELT-Tutor’s Appy Advent Scratch challenge (download the Appy Advent Calendar here). Just like in the first two weeks, you can discover a new animation, quiz or game every day, you can explore the code inside and create your own version with a video tutorial (if there is something new to learn) or an ‘edit’ version of the code (to put into the correct sequence and/or complete). Scratch is free online app (available also for download) created for kids to learn the basics of coding: algorithm, sequences, repetition, variables, etc. It’s a visual platform, so

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Appy Advent – Activities for Advent Time (Week 2)

/ Lesson tips, Students, Teachers, Young Learners

Welcome to the second week of this year’s Advent challenge with Scratch (Here’s the Advent calendar with the entire program). As you know, you can discover a new animation, quiz or game every day, you can explore the code inside and create your own version with a video tutorial (if there is something new to learn) or an ‘edit’ version of the code (to put into the correct sequence and/or complete). Scratch is free online app (available also for download) created for kids to learn the basics of coding: algorithm, sequences, repetition, variables, etc. It’s a visual platform, so instead

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Appy Advent – Activities for Advent Time (Week 1)

/ Lesson tips, Students, Teachers, Young Learners

Looking for an alternative Advent Calendar? This year, I’d like to invite young and old explorers, creators, discoverers to spend the coming 4 weeks with a daily coding challenge. Every day, you can discover a new animation, quiz or game, you can explore the code inside and create your own version with a video tutorial (if there is something new to learn) or an ‘edit’ version of the code (to put into the correct sequence and/or complete). Scratch is free online app (available also for download) created for kids to learn the basics of coding: algorithm, sequences, repetition, variables, etc.

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SCRATCH challenge: What’s the difference?

/ A1, A2, Pre-A1, Speaking and Conversation, Teachers, Young Learners

Another Scratch app this time to use and remake. It helps your students practise to find and describe differences in pictures and for Scratchers it’s a nice way to practise costume-change and sprite editing. Find the differences Instructions: Click onto the green flag and then memorize the picture for 30 seconds.Then click the A key on your keyboard and note 5 differences.Finally, click onto SPACE and not 6 differences.Do you have a good memory? For Scrachers, SEE INSIDE, it’s a simple costume-change code, however, in some cases, you need to move the sprite away from its centre point. You might

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Revising clothes vocabulary with a Scratch challenge

/ A1, Lesson tips, Pre-A1, Teachers, Vocabulary training, Young Learners

Talking about clothes is always a great opportunity to revise not only vocabulary linked to fashion, colours and shades, but also to recap the word order ‘adjective + noun’. Last but not least, it is also a great opportunity to play. In this post, I’d like to show you one Scratch animation and one follow-up activity for both, online and classroom lessons. The animation (Scratch challenge): Instruction: Click onto the green flag and after a while stop the animation with the red button (or the space key). Describe what Daisy is wearing. For Teachers: You can play this game with

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Online English lessons and coding with YL (Part Three)

/ A1, A2, Lesson tips, Pre-A1, Teachers, Young Learners

January 2021 – This is the last part of a three-post serie, giving suggestions on how to use Scratch codes in teaching English (and coding) to Young Learners (above all in online YL lessons). In the first part, I describe simple animations to revise numbers and prepositions of place, while in the second post, mazes were proposed to practice giving directions and question-answer animations. This time, I invite you to adventure into the Scratch world of quizzes and stories.

Online English lessons and coding with YL (Part Two)

/ A1, A2, Lesson tips, Pre-A1, Teachers, Young Learners

January 2021 – In my previous post, I suggested that teachers giving online lessons to YL try out some alternative tasks using the programming language Scratch. This coding program was customized for elementary school students to introduce them to the universe of algorithms, sequencing, variables and others. So the main aim of the Scratch project is to teach coding to pupils. However, Scratch could come in really handy when giving online English lessons to Young Learners. In Part One, you can read about how to practise numbers and prepositions of places with Scratch animations. In this post, I’d like to

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Online English lessons and coding with YL (Part One)

/ A1, A2, Lesson tips, Pre-A1, Teachers, Young Learners

January 2021 – As many of my colleagues, I ended up teaching completely online nearly a year ago. With teen and adult classes, the switch to video-call lessons was surprisingly smooth. However, things were not as easy with online English lessons with YL (Young Learners). Mainly, because parents – among them myself – were worried about how much time their children spent in front of different screens and secondly, because my students were used to lessons full of movement and games. We desperately needed inspiration. It came from one of the many Future Learn courses.