Sites for Teachers of (Very) Young Learners

Hi and welcome if you came to Monday's technology session on our teaching very young learners course...

The following, in alphabetical order, were some of the links I suggested to sites with either lots of resources for teachers of young learners and/or -- and perhaps more importantly -- ideas and the resources for professional development.

• British Council "Kids" site
• DLTK's Crafts for Kids
• EnchantedLearning.com
  
• First-School Preschool Activities and Crafts
• IATEFL Young Learners SIG (see also its discussion group and list of other links)
• National Geographic Kids site
• OneStopEnglish.com (subscription required for full access)
• PrometheanPlanet.com for resources to be used on interactive whiteboards (registration required)
• TeachingEnglish.org.uk (see also the Language Assistant site with its "Primary Tips", "Games" etc sections)
• Times Educational Supplement (registration required)

Great sites! But are they...?
As I suggested in the seminar, while there are undoubtedly some great resources on such sites, I'd be just a little wary about becoming a heavy user of them. The trouble with them, I would suggest, is that it may end up being the teacher not the learners using the technology, whereas I think it should in fact be the other way round.

Go for the sites that are giving you ideas, rather than printouts -- the IATEFL YL SIG, for example, rather than First School, or the community section on TES, rather than the resources section on the same site.

As my DELTA tutor, Neil Forrest once said to us: "An idea is worth a thousand photocopies".

Footnote: year groups, ages...
On some of the above, where there is so much material it may be helpful to search by age group, and on the sites not intended primarily for ELT, it maybe helpful to know how ages correspond to the years kids are in... Wikipedia tells us -- for England, Scotland and the US.

From the same seminar:

>> Stickers for your kids: print them or make them?
>> Resource books for teaching young learners