Music is fun!

Music is fun! is the CLIL e-publication for Primary bilingual learners by @koralinda27.

Coral Mg is a pre-service teacher who has just designed her first open educational digital publication as part of her Master's Degree Module on The Use of ICT and Web Resources for Primary Bilingual Education at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.

She has been working hard for 3 months in order to be able to come up with this digital resource, which I am sure will be inspirational for any CLIL Primary teacher and learner interested in Music and English.

If you surf around her e-publication you are bound to find engaging missions aimed at 3rd graders to be collaboratively challenged into learning by doing while having fun. Just check this awesome video challenge where learners meet the notes with Mozart that @koralinda27 has designed in cooperation with her peer pre-service teacher @utopicmarta and have a glimpse at what Music is fun! has to offer:

And if you are more into audio challenges, the e-publication also includes a podcasting channel where CLIL learners are introduced into speaking and listening skills in an easy straight forward way that will lead them to grab awards and have their findings gamified:

But Coral has gone a long way in order to be able to publish this digital CLIL OER. From a drafted mindmap, crossing evaluation of visual principles, diving into licences, citing, attributing and connecting with other educators worldwide, up to attending online sessions and co-presenting, while designing CLIL artifacts and rising up to collaboration, and so forth.

But why reading this post when you can actually listen to Coral herself narrating her own learning through ICT? There you go her reflections on this three-month cruise around CLIL and ICT:

Congratulations, Coral, for such a nice e-publication!

On the road again!

Summer is over, so here we are again!!

A new school year begins and most of us will have to get used to new timetables, some will teach new students or even work at a new school , but all of us will face new challenges and look forward to achieving new goals, won’t we?

From the ESL Times we just want to welcome you back and wish you the best of lucks for the present year.

We want to keep managing this space in order to make it easy for you to use it, to share your students’ productions or your teaching ideas or just letting us know any news you think might be of interest. We will do our best to spread the word.

So, please, keep tuned; new sections and new features will appear here soon and, as usual, you –and your students- will be the stars!!

Happy back to school!!

Music at school

How to use a song?

In my school, I am used to singing and dancing with children. They like to mime the actions and enjoy to learn by acting (Total Physical Response). 

Last month I prepared two of their best known songs this year because they had been regularly listening to them during beaktime, but they didn't know the meaning of  the lyrics.

Some recommendations about how to use a song:

- Play it three times at least, the first time they will be puzzled, the second, with some guide they will start to understand, at the end they will enjoy and repeat.

- Don't worry if they don't fully understand all the lyrics. Depending on the level you could translate some parts or maybe just the chorus.

- They will help you to teach vocabulary easily.

- When you use songs that can be taught through gestures, very little pre-teaching is necessary. I try to prepare some of them in advance, but you can also ask your students to invent new ones.

Here are the songs and the suggested lesson plans for them:

Good luck and, enjoy!!!
Pilar The Moon.