Warmers and a comprehension strategy

A warmer is an activity at the start of the class to warm up the learners. They tend to be short, dynamic activities. They also work as anticipatory strategies to create a learning atmosphere and foster eagerness to learn more on the topic. Here are just a few examples that may be very easily prepared and  put into practice like games:
By the way, in case we don't know how to pronounce an English word, particularly a proper name, we may listen to the pronunciation of that word with this pronunciation dictionary.
In addition to that here is a so called "canned" strategy from SIOP that may be very useful to analyse different types of questions students must learn to ask in order to learn a given topic.

CLIL at IES Frederic Mompou de Sant Vicenç del Horts



This High School has been implementing  Science and Music in English for several years.  Their lesson plans include the teaching objectives as well as the outcomes they expect from students.  For each of the units they have developed a variety of tasks accompanied by timing, necessary  resources and assessment clues.

Samples of Rubrics and Checklists for Assessment





Here is Sheila Toth's oral presentation rubric. I think it is clear and simple so that students can also use it to assess their peers. This collaboration rubric may be very useful to assess the projectwork process: at the beginning: how far students are participating, sharing responsabilities; and while they are working on their projects: having conversations, reviewing each other's work, etc. Finally, this is a sample of power point presentation assessment sheet that you may find useful too.

Music in English



Here you have Mª Jesús Camino Rentería's blog. There you'll be able to get activities and good ideas to help students improve their musical skills in English.

CIREL'S ready-to-use CLIL materials


The CIREL website, an agency of the Education Department of the Catalan Government, offers a large bank of ready-to-use CLIL didactic units  covering a wide range of topics of various subject areas for both Primary and Secondary school.
These materials have been designed by Catalan teachers during a paid-study leave in the UK and are displayed in two different blocks: one collects  materials which cover 35 teaching hours; the other lists 6-10 teaching hours materials. Although Catalan is the vehicular language of the site, all worksheets, teacher’s guidelines, activities descriptions and further materials are written in English. It is really worth taking a look at them.

We would like to congratulate the teachers who have designed these materials for their great job and thank them for sharing it.


CLIL in Andalucia


The Andalusian regional ministry of education has published a bank of content materials for bilingual education. 

They were designed for use in CLIL  classes (Social and Natural Science; Mathematics; Music; Sport; Technology and Art) at Primary and Secondary level in three L2s: English, French and German. Each unit is organized around a specific content topic and covers 6-10 classroom sessions. The units open with an outline of content, linguistic and competence goals and each is accompanied by a teacher guide. 

The units were designed by experienced CLIL teachers with methodological and linguistic support from a team led by Francisco Lorenzo and including Pat Moore, both CLIL ReN members and researchers at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide´s Learning Research Centre Icárea. 

These materials  are  available on-line (and free) at:

http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/educacion/webportal/web/aicle/

A webquest on Christmas


Planning Christmas is a webquest created with google sites for students in their last level of Primary education or DBH 1st level/ 1st cycle.

Task 6 shows a checklist for students to prepare their oral presentation to the class. The rubric for the whole webquest is in the assessment section.

As you may see, it proposes tasks for students to work on their own in pairs while the teacher moves around helping here and there. Students have to use web resources as well as the attachments uploaded by the teacher. Feel free to use it as it is or use anything you like about it!

Blogging around


Just in case we decide to learn a bit on blogging, here is Felipe Zayas' concept map on blogs. He offers a general view on how blogs may be used for different purposes in the school context.

Here are some samples on how different English teachers are using blogs with their students and this is a document on blogging, just some basic general things.

Last but not least here are some tutorials in Basque created by Irene Gonzalez (B06 Berritzeguneko Aholkularia).

Films as an educational tool

www.filmeducation.org provides award-winning teaching resources, teacher training and cinema based events which support the use of film within the curriculum.  You can find some interesting   resources on recent films both for Primary and Secondary level. (You won't be able to see the films but only some extracts from them)


University of Missouri: Content-rich online resources


eThemes is a very powerful source for content-rich online resources that will help enhance your teaching and save you time. eThemes provides free, fast access to over 2,500 collections of websites, on a wide variety of topics.

You can either use keywords to search the database
or browse the entire list of topics which you will find listed alphabetically or by grade level. 

Music: the unspoken word






No matter what your age, nationality or social status are, music reaches deep inside all of us. It evokes feelings, memories and emotions. Therefore, no one wants to miss the experience and students are not the exception. So, why don't you make the most of the highly motivating power of music in your classes?
The site we propose will help your students to develop a higher understanding of music. It contains video interviews with worldwide known musicians, a research assistant, competitive quizzes and a wide range of content.

Click here to check it out.

Educational videos on different subjects

www.neok12.com is a web site where you can find a great deal of educational videos, lessons and games on different areas.

For instance, you will find some of them on oceans with the corresponding activities and quizzes to check students' understanding.

Have a look at this one as a sample:




Science in English and other languages

Here you have a web site which focuses on Science teaching and research. What makes it really valuable is the fact that it is written in many different languages so it can be very useful for your multicultural classes: www.scienceinschool.org

Healthy horrors: the benefits of parasites

Learning to learn

Here you've got B06 Jardunaldien bloga.  so that you may get some info about the talks and good practice presentations that have taken place.

Education Scotland also offer interesting ideas and resources in his Approaches to Learning site.

In addition to that, this Resource Guide for Secondary Foreign Language Educators may be downloaded clicking on the link! It is really interesting and practical!

Visiting museums on line: The Art Project

Do you know the Art Project? It is a wonderful tool for students to explore different museums from around the world and discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels:

Arts Alive

Click on the picture to visit this Canadian site where lots of ideas and resources may be found to work on drama, music and dance.


Welcome to the seminar





This blog has particularly been created to be used as a meeting point for teachers involved in our Learning in a CLIL context  seminar , so that we may exchange views, worries, all types of ideas and resources.  It will be up to us how useful it becomes and I think it will be a success!
Please, feel free to comment anything you wish/ ask about something you need, so that we all may  help each other!