Hi! This week I am here with a funny story. Do you want to hear my story? But before I will give you some information about the process of creating our own story. My friends, Sevda and Melike, and I are supposed to create our own story with our own drawings and also narrate the story we create so we decided to write a funny and also easy to understand story but it is not that easy to find the characters since we spent a long time to find the characters. We created a fantastic story full of colours and crazy ideas. We recorded the narration part in the school so there were lots of things to distract us while doing the recording part since we can't stop laughing and we tried to record it almost ten times and we had only 3 days to submit the story so it was the most difficult part I guess. As for the drawing part, we used Adobe Photoshop program and benefited from Melike's digital drawing skills. After that I prepared the sound effects and finding the background music was another problem for us but we found it eventually! However, the sounds we found were too long for using at the background and also we needed some nature sounds like birds tweeting,bushes' rustling, magical appearing sound effect and also whinnying sound effect for our lovely unicorn so I had to combine them in a song. We used http://mp3cut.net/tr/ for cutting and combining the sounds. Finally we made them together with the help of Movie maker program. The most heart-warming part was seeing what we produced after all those problems. I think story telling is one of the best activities for gaining team working and organizing skills. Also it is super beneficial for putting your creativity into good use and developing your speaking skills. You can find the video and the text of the story below!
~A Journey to Happyland~ Once upon a time in Sugar Land, there is a little girl called Ice cream Princess. She doesn't have any friends except from her unicorn Buttercup. Everybody finds her weird because of her passion about discovering other worlds. One day Ice Cream Princess and Buttercup decide to leave the country in pursuit of realizing their dreams. They take some food with them but after 3 days,they run out of food. They are hopeless and helpless. Suddenly, they hear a sound! It is coming from bushes. They are at the edge of screaming but a Chilli Pepper boy appear in that time. Seeing that they are helpless, he comes closer to Ice Cream Princess and says: Hi! My name is Chilli Pepper Joe, I am a friend who comes from Chilli Pepper Land. What's your name? Ice Cream Princess replies: Hi! My name is Ice Cream Princess and this is my unicorn Buttercup. We come from Sugar Land, we are looking for a place to live happily. Why are you here? Chilli Pepper Joe replies: I left my town, everybody looks down on me because I'm so tiny and I'm also looking for a place like you. Chilli Pepper Joe shares his food with them and they continue to walk together. suddenly they hear a sound and see an upturned turtle. Turtle says: "Oh, please can you help me? My feet are too short to turn." Ice Cream Princess and Chilli Pepper Joe immediately help the turtle and turn him to together. Mr. Turtle: " Oh, thank you so much. Without you, I wouldn't be able to turn. I want to help you,too. Chilli Pepper Joe says: "You are welcome. We are looking for a place where we can live happily. Can you help us?" Mr. Turtle replies: That's easy, here take these tickets. I'm coming from there. The train will depart in 5 minutes from that stop." Suddenly a stop made up of candies appears. Ice Cream Princess and Chilli Pepper Joe thank Mr. Turtle and go to the candy stop. They get on the train and they live happily ever after in Happyland! <3
Hi! Today I'll give you some information about one of the sites I like most. You can find the site by clicking on this link : http://www.barryfunenglish.com/
As you see in the picture, the site has a colourful background which can easily draw the attention of students. The site mostly focuses on teaching through fun games, exercises, presentations and using basic grammar rules so we can say that the target audience can be everybody who is at the beginner to intermediate level. You should create an account for reaching the documents but it is required to have a premium membership to have full access to the exercises, actually there is no clear information about the owner of the site except from an email address, since it is an open resource you can upload your own products to the site. If you want to know more about the site, you can contact with the creator of this site barry@barryfunenglish.com Barry Fun English offers you lots of games, presentations, flashcards and also you can benefit from the tools which is very useful for time management in the class. Let's make a closer look to each of them. Tools
If you use games in your lessons, you'll really like these tools. These tools help you shorten the time you spend for making groups. Once you enter the list of the students, you can use random student selector for making groups, or you can also you this tool when you ask a question since you don't have to choose between the ones who raise their hands, they all have to be fully attended to the class because no one knows who will be chosen. You can also use dart board selection but you can hit the same target with the same colour so it may take more time, when something happens like this. You can use stopwatch and score board while doing classroom discussions which will make students more eager to speak and express their thoughts or comment on the given topic.
There is another interesting tool called English name maker which gives students new names and make them feel less inhibited since their performance is really that of different person with a new name. Students learn through trial and error but children can criticize each other mercilessly and this may pave the way for a severe discouragement for the students make mistakes. However, assuming a new identity enhances students' feeling of security and allows them to be more open. Games
As for the games, there are lots of games in this site and everyday you can find new amazing games. I just tried one of them to show you an example. Most of us already know about the hangman game and in this site, this game designed as a way of teaching students past forms, past participles or other tense related words like 'will be going', 'was playing' etc. and also it is a good way to learn syllables.
Also you can choose the difficulty level which gives you the chance of seeing in which words or which subjects your students have some difficulties. Flashcards
There are numerous flashcards in this site. Flashcards are of course one of the best way to teach students the basic words but this site provides you a lot of flashcards about any subject you can think about and also there are lots of colourful pictures that can draw the attention of students.
Mainly there are four categories and for each category, there are also subcategories as you see in the picture. You can also print these flashcards and hang them in your classroom or download the pdf files for using them in your presentations. Presentations
There are a lot of short presentations that you can use for colouring your lessons. As you can see in the pictures, the presentations are prepared with funny pictures so that you can create a positive climate while teaching and also you can support these presentations with the games in the site. Hangman can also be useful with the vocabularies. You can find other subjects in the part I draw with a red pen.
Worksheets
Worksheets are accepted as one of the best way to do exercises and revised the covered subject. Barry Fun English also provides you a lot of worksheets and they are all ready to print for classroom use. You can see the examples below.
As for my own thoughts about the site, I think there are lots of useful tools, worksheets, games etc. that I'll definitely use in my own lessons. Students really like colourful and funny things so in terms of these factors this site can be a rich resource for teaching in elementary classes and since they are all ready to print and download, it is really easy to access all these documents. Another good thing about the site is you can upload your own products to the site after signing up. However, I noticed that there are no video or audio lessons and also reading parts are pretty limited, this site mostly focuses on the exercising part Another thing that I hate most is that it is required to be a premium member to have an access for most of the games and worksheets, but still there are lots of things you can benefit from for your teaching in this site. I hope you enjoy while using this site!
