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As we said on the previous page, this section is not prescriptive; it is not a set of instructions on how to use our resource. It is intended as a statement of what things will be appearing and a couple of ideas as to how you can use them.
This section is intended for people who are working with children of 7 and under but of course it can be used by older people who may just be starting to learn English.
Each week, appearing in the little blog part of the Schools section, there will be a short update "written" by a little creature we are taking with us. Within the update we will try and include some parts of speech in English. For example we might talk about tall, taller and tallest in relation to something our little creature has seen. The text will be accompanied by a minimum of four photos that the pupils can study but each photo will contain our little friend somewhere. This will encourage the pupils to look more closely at the pictures.
Our suggestion is that you use the material as a basis for topic discussion within your class. Obviously, and perhaps the only downside of the whole resource, we cannot tell you in advance what will appear. By going to the route page you can check out which country we will be heading to next. However the update will appear each Monday morning and so, if your class has computer access later in the week, you will have a little time to see the material and plan ahead. The material is very useful in literacy work and also as an introduction to finding out more about their world.
If all your class have access to computers at least once a week then you can load the appropriate page and pupils can read through the material and you can follow this with a discussion or written work relevant to the text. Our only suggestion is to perhaps make use of it early in the week thereby removing the possibility of pupils with access at home announcing, "we've already read this miss" and slightly disrupting your plans.
If you have just one computer available then you can single out a different pupil each week to read the text and maybe describe the photos, a very useful lesson in communication as well as literacy. Discussion or written work can follow this as described above.
If you do not have internet access in the class then you can still use the material by printing the relevant text and photos, probably best to use the enlarged ones obtained by clicking the small image, and then handing these out to each pupil (as in 1) or to a selected pupil (as in 2)
There are of course other ways in which the material can be used but we leave that up to you. We would however love to have your ideas through the teachers forum part of our site.
We have also designed some simple "themes" for this age group. These can be used as an output for the topic work and, as they will then appear on a global website, are highly motivational even to young pupils. Each year we will introduce two new themes. Having done these themes, pupils can be encouraged to read those submitted by other people all over the world.
You can, if you wish, also use the material appearing in the other update for juniors but this would require more guidance from you. You can also make use of the material contained within the country pages for each country we visit. However the material in the infant section will give some idea of life in whichever country we are visiting.
Young pupils can also undertake the art themes found in a separate section of the Your World Pages.
For those schools who have subscribed to one of the paid sections of the website (i.e. putting on information about their school within our global schools section or wishing to place your own social studies enquiries on our site) a small set of teachers notes will accompany each update. Others can subscribe separately to this by clicking here. This does not apply to partner or network schools who will receive the notes free.
There is also a section that will allow you to find a partner school with whom you can work.
The beauty of this resource is that it grows with the pupils and when they advance through school or even on to senior school they can take this familiar learning resource with them but at their new level of learning.
