EFL resources for Early Childhood Education teachers

EFL resources early childhood

Today’s post is a special one. We have the pleasure to host a group of student-teachers from the University of Manresa-UVic. They are studying Early Childhood Education, and even though they are not planning to teach English in the future, they have done a great job for their Teaching English course and they are happy to share it with L’escola del món‘s readers. Thus, in this post you are going to find their compilation of interesting websites with EFL resources for Early Childhood Education teachers. If you teach English to very young kids, this post might be of your interest!

Post by a group of 3rd year students in Early Childhood Education (UManresa, year 2019-2020)

Meet a group of hard-working Early Childhood Education student-teachers who have faced the challenge of virtual education due to the COVI19 crisis. Together with their lecturer, they have challenged themselves and have committed to find the bright side of it all. They have learned about digital tools at their disposal and they have dedicated their time to reflect on the current situation of English language teaching and learning. In this post, they share a list of websites with teaching resources to use in your English classes with young children  (taken both from native Early Childhood teachers and EFL teachers).

19 Websites with EFL resources for Early Childhood Education teachers  

 

By Àfrica Puig, Marta Rodríguez, Anna Sarri & Raquel Suárez

1. Cambridge Assessment

This website is perfect for Early Childhood education teachers but also for parents. It offers useful material which will help children to learn English in a fun way but also will help teachers/adults to improve their English skills and get new ideas for their English lessons.

We recommend it because:

  • It contains fun materials to learn English such as songs or games.
  • All resources are divided according to different levels of English.
  • It includes extra material for each activity.
  • It can be used by children, teachers and adults.
  • Adults can benefit from the resources to improve their own English skills.
  • It includes ideas and resources for teachers to improve their English teaching strategies.
  • It gives teachers and adults the opportunity to exchange knowledge with other teachers and English learners from all over the world.

2. Teaching English

This webpage is fantastic for Early Childhood education teachers and also for parents. Although it is not aimed at early childhood education, we can find a lot of diverse and interesting content that teachers can adapt and use with children to help them learn English in meaningful way.

We recommend it because:

  • It offers a variety of interesting resources: lesson plans, activities, stories and poems, songs and teaching tools.
  • The activities are diverse and very well explained.
  • It is very well-organized.
  • There is extra material (lesson plans and other types of useful documents) attached to each activity.
  • It gives new ideas, inspiration and even full lesson-plans to teachers to make their English lessons more motivating.

3. ESL Partyland

This website is great for Early Childhood education teachers (especially) and parents because it offers different material and strategies to help teachers make English learning interesting for children while, at the same time, it offers resources to improve English for adults.

We recommend it because:

  • It contains interesting and diverse resources.
  • It includes high quality material for teachers.
  • It is well-organized.
  • It contains resources and strategies for English teachers and their lessons.
  • It has different activities that can be adapted to different levels.

 

 

By Elsa Colldeforn, Tiaré Castellar, Karuna Arboix , Judit Grimaldos & Ariadna Moyano

4. CBeebies 

This website offers different kind of activities addressing different topics to address with children.  This resource is perfect for early childhood teachers!

We recommend it because:

  • It is well-organized.
  • It offers different kind of activities (storytelling, pedagogical games, songs and crafts).
  • It includes different academic topics (Maths, Science, animals, History…)
  • Children can explore it on their own (all activities can be  projected on the whiteboard).

5. Genki English!

In Genki English  you can find many pedagogical proposals based on games, ready to be implemented in a kindergarten English class, while making the learning of English  more fun and enjoyable.

We recommend it because:

  • It offers different kind of activities, games and resources (games, songs, activities, materials, stories…).
  • Children can learn English while they have a good time.
  • It includes lesson plans and strategies for English language teaching and learning.
  • The resources are online and free and teachers can download them and adapt them to their students.

6. Early Childhood Teacher

In this website there is a wide variety of links to other pages that contain plenty of different EFL resources.

We recommend it because:

  • It contains links to songs, board games, activities, materials and visual stories.
  • It includes lesson plans and strategies for English learning.
  • It can be used either by teachers or parents.
  • The resources are online and free and teachers can download them and adapt them to their students.

We highly recommend the section Clip Art, which provides us with drawings of all kinds of situations, such as birthdays, parties, animals, plants, clothes, food… a lot of themes that can be used at any time. It can be a very useful section to work on specific vocabulary while having a visual support that facilitates the children’s understanding.

 

 

By Mar Portet, Cristina Sandoval & Laura Sorroche

7. LearnEnglish Kids 

This website is perfect for Early Childhood education teachers or parents because there is a wide variety of content to practice English. It is divided into 7 sections: Listen and watch, Read and write, Speak and spell, Grammar and vocabulary, Fun and games, Print and make and Parents.  The latter section contains great suggestions on how to use the website so that parents help their child with English.

We recommend it because:

  • The British Council has the knowledge and validity to provide good resources for children to learn English and to propose useful activities around these resources.
  • It is well-organized because it is divided into many parts and it is easy to find the theme you want to work on.
  • It includes lesson-plans and many interactive activities, and this encourages children to improve their knowledge, whether accompanied or autonomously.
  • It can be used by children because it is intuitive and easy to use autonomously.
  • It includes a section of parental control.

8. The Imagination Tree

This website is perfect for teachers and Early Childhood Education and families because includes different resources that can help us to do activities with children in many areas that can be related and do it in English. There is very content to practice mathematics, literatura, creativity, etc.

We recommend it because:

  • It provides different resources that can help teachers to carry out activities with children in many areas.
  • It also gives teachers information and different resources to expand their lesson plans.

9. Teaching Primary – British Council

This website is perfect for Primary education teachers or parents because there are a lot of resources that teachers can use in their English class with children. There are a lot of lessons, activities, stories, poems that they can use with children for learn English. There are teaching tool too, for teachers to use with children.

We recommend it because:

  • It is well organized in sections.
  • It’s written by experts in English Language Teaching.
  • It includes lesson-plans, a lot of songs, poems and stories in English and teaching tools.
  • With all these resources, children can use their English in engaging, motivating and enjoyable ways.

 

 

By Judith Lujan, Noelia Bosch, Claudia Gener

10. Parenting Healthy Babies: 11 Fun Filled Dance Games for Kids

This website is perfect for Early Childhood education teachers/parents because it suggests 11 different games to play with children. Also, this resource can help teachers to get inspiring ideas which can be adapted and modified according to teachers and students’ preferences, levels, learning styles…

We recommend it because:

  • It is easy to understand
  • It includes which skills you can work on
  • It contains a lot of games to practice English
  • It can be used to learn new vocabulary
  • It does not require a lot of material
  • Both children and adults can have a good time

 

11. Super Simple Songs

This website is perfect for Early Childhood education teachers/parents because it contains a lot of different thematic songs. Besides, there are also videos with  possible choreographies or cartoons with the respective lyrics.

We recommend it because:

  • It is easy to use and manage
  • It is well-organized
  • It contains a lot of songs in English
  • You can use it to work on  vocabulary
  • You can work on different aspects behind each song
  • It can be used and explored by children, teachers and parents.

 

By Carla Ballarà, Júlia Foradada & Laura Orive

12. National Geographic Kids

This website is perfect to learn a lot of things about our environment. For instance, children can carry out scientific experiments in the classroom.

We recommend it because:

  • It contains games, animal photography, interesting facts about animals, habits to take care of the environment, photos of nature, science experiments, and information about different countries.

13. Sesame Street

Sesame Street is a didactic recourse that can be useful for enriching children’s vocabulary.

We recommend it because:

  • It combines English education with entertainment (cartoons).
  • Each activity contains very repetitive elements. The characters  explain and repeat what needs to be done.
  • It includes resources like vocabulary about emotions, numbers, the alphabet, geometric figures… as well as songs.

14. Teach Starter

Even though this website is mainly directed at Primary teachers, it is also a perfect resource for Early Childhood education teachers.

We recommend it because:

  • You can find resources such as activities, worksheets, crafts templates, cards for mindfulness activities, role playing games, hygiene posters, dance cards.
  • You can find resources related to Maths, Science, Arts and, of course, English.
  • You can design a lot of activities based on these resources or you can use them to get inspired.

 

 

By Marta González, Núria Rodríguez & Carla Sánchez

15. Help my Kid Learn

This website is perfect for Early Childhood education teachers/parents because it can be used for different stages (from 0 to 12 years old). The resources are classified in the following sections: talk, play, read, write and count.

We recommend it because:

  • It is well-organized
  • It includes lesson plans
  • It contains a lot of songs and videos in English.
  • It can be used by children if presented and explained what to do, why and how to do it.

 

16. Symbaloo : Jocs d’anglès per Educació Infantil

This website is perfect for Early Childhood education teachers and also parents.  There a lot of websites with games, songs and activities for children between 3-6 years, but not all of them can be directly used by kindergarten children. This compilation of games is perfect for young kids to use.

We recommend it because: 

  • It can be used by children, parents or teachers.
  • It contains a lot of activities to work on the same theme.
  • A high English level is not required to understand the activities.
  • Each activity is different.

 

 

 

By Júlia Perich, Marta Rosell & Júlia Solsona

17. Recursos per Educació Infantil

This website is perfect for Early Childhood education teachers because there are many resources to teach English in the Early Childhood Education stage. All these resources are basically games to learn English. Particularly, there are plenty of different activities to help kids improve their vocabulary.

We recommend it because:

  • As future teachers we believe that it shows a different way to learn English and have fun at the same time.
  • It contains a lot of games to learn  numbers, clothes, geometric shapes…  These resources can be useful to complement the activities done in class or to improve their English.
  • It can be explored by the children themselves.

An activity that we can do using this website is to make little groups of children. Each group can choose a game to play. When they finish we can chat about what they played and each group can explain what they did and what they learned.

 

18. Cómo enseñar inglés a los niños

This website is perfect for Early Childhood Education teachers and parents because it explains that the best way to learn English in Garden school is by doing different activities and games. Furthermore, the teacher/ parent should have motivation, imagination, patience and persistence.

We recommend it because:

  • As future teachers, we believe that this article may be helpful, as it contains flashcards, online games, board games, cartoons, tales, books, and songs.
  • One of these activities could be a memory with flashcards. It can be played by children, and they can learn new vocabulary as they enjoy and have fun.

 

19.  How to teach English to children: 3 powerful strategies for impressive results

This website is perfect for Early Childhood education teachers. The article sums up the information in three key points: do it fun for kids. For example, playing games, being creative, including art in class or taking your class outside. In the second place, it has to be an active process for them. It has to be dynamic and real. And last but not least, we can’t put pressure on them. Teachers must respect the learning rhythms from each child and adapt us to them.

We recommend it because:

  • As future teachers, we think that these three points are useful in English lesson-plans, but also in other classes and activities during school time.
  • It also contains examples of games and activities that we can do with kids if we follow these three points

 

An example of an activity or game in English that you can get to know on this website is doing a treasure hunt with children. It is a different activity because you can play outside. The kids can be outside with clues to solve. Each clue leads to another. The teacher can hide the clues before class and then give plenty of time to gather all of them. It’s a game where all the class can play and they can help each other and complement each other

 

 Thanks a million future teachers! Awesome EFL resources for Early Childhood Education teachers!  I am sure that the websites you provided  will be useful for many educators who need inspiration and ideas. Well done!   If you are a new reader, remember you can subscribe to  «L’escola del món», a webiste where you will find resources and ideas to turn English learning into meaningful experiences. In our blog you will find plenty of resources, ideas and recommendations. You can also follow us on   Facebook 🙂

 

About the authors:  Early Childhood Education students (3rd year) at the UManresa-UVic (2019-2020)

 

 

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