LET: The Treasure Hunt Club

□■━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
■ The Treasure Hunt Club No. 90
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
February 2013 Treasure Hunt
Reading Resources and Activities and Kickstarter
Marcel Van Amelsvoort
神奈川県立国際言語文化アカデミア
Kanagawa Prefectural Institute of Language and
Culture Studies

This month's theme is reading, and I have several sites that can
help reading teachers to plan and teach reading, and several sites
for reading students to practice reading while having fun.

Readworks.org helps teachers with the what and how of teaching
reading. Hundreds of short reading texts with complete lesson plans
are available for use here. If you are teaching reading to teenagers
or college students, please be sure to take a look.
http://www.readworks.org/

Literactive is a huge site with all sorts of reading activities and
resources for both learners and teachers. It has lots of talking
stories and interactive stories that are especially good for younger
readers. Registration required.
http://www.literactive.com/Home/index.asp

USA Learns has a nice reading section. There are lots of accessible
reading passages with audio. http://usalearns.org Click on the
Reading link. But take a look at the whole site while you're there.
It's really very good.

Mingoville is a free and fun way to learn English for younger
learners. Surprisingly, it is made in Denmark and language support
is available in Japanese (as well as other languages). Registration
is required. http://www.mingoville.com/ja.html

Peguin's We Tell Stories Site has an interactive fairy tale called
Once Upon a Time. You have to input various pieces of information
and make choices about the characters. The site has a nice, clean
interface and is great fun for all ages.
http://www.wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week3/

For something a little whimsical for all ages take a look at
Magnetic Poetry. Originally, magnetic poetry kits were popular items
sold in bookstores. People stuck the hundreds of words to their
fridge at home and the whole family had fun making “poems.” Now
you can experience this online at
http://play.magneticpoetry.com/poem/Original/kit/

For something a little more interesting and engaging for older
readers, Kickstarter.com is a great resource. It is not an EFL site
at all, but rather a site where people go who have business or art
project ideas but need money to get started. Just reading the
proposals and watching the videos is engaging, however, and the
excitement of ideas is palpable. It can also help learners to
understand the importance of multimedia in presentations and
proposals. For an interesting lesson, learners could discuss or
assess different proposals. Or they could even plan or make one as a
project. You might need to help learners out with the navigation, or
even choose a few target topics to get them started.
http://www.kickstarter.com/

That's it for this month. See you next month. For anyone who might
be interested, I occasionally introduce websites and tools on
Twitter ( @Marcelva )

Tweet