MooreEnglish » Curricula

FSI Language Courses

Nathan — Sun, 02 May 2010 03:00:00 +0000

I’m excited about this find. These free language courses were originally written for the United States Foreign Service Institute. You can buy them on Amazon but be ready to pay a lot more than you wanted to spend.

Here’s a list of the courses available (so far):

Amharic, Arabic, Bulgarian, Cambodian (Khmer), Cantonese, Chinese, Chinyanja, Czech, Finnish, French, Fula, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Italian, Japanese, Kituba, Korean, Lao, Lingala, Luganda Moré, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Shona, Sinhala, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Twi, Vietnamese, Yoruba

Destinos: A Soap for Learning Spanish

Nathan — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 04:58:42 +0000

My formal Spanish training came through an intense summer course, in which we used Destinos as our text. I took the course more than 10 years ago and at least 4 years before I actually needed to use Spanish for anything. Destinos uses the drama to teach vocabulary and gradually transition viewers from English to Spanish. I just discovered that its all online for free. Perhaps I’ll watch it again sometime.

Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish

Sprout Online

Nathan — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:16:26 +0000

Sprout is a broadcaster of preschool television. Most of their content comes from the PBS, BBC, and other public broadcasters. They also produce some of their own content. If you are interested, here is their schedule and programming lineup. My wife and I restrict our kids’ television diet to Sprout, but they are more than happy with that.

Their website seems to be closely aligned to their programing which is very educational. Games are categorized by character, educational skill, and favorites (which registered users use to bookmark their favorite games). The educational categories include:

Check it out.

The Playground from ABC of Australia

Nathan — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 03:17:41 +0000

I’m not convinced that everything on The Playground is completely educational, but much of it is. There are a lot of opportunities for incidental English (ESL) vocabulary learning. This online games site is entertaining and rewarding to play. My kids and I like Olivia and the Olivia sections were impressively done. My daughter played Olivia for a while, but after that she went right back to her old favorite, Starfall.

Much of The Playground website is animated, colorful, and interactive. Some of the games (such as Jakers) require some reading of instructions, which might make those games difficult for preschoolers. It’s definitely worth a visit. If you do try it, let me know what you liked best.

Online Games for Preschoolers at CBC

Nathan — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:00:50 +0000

The CBC has a number of good literacy, language, and numeracy games online. They’d definitely be good for preschoolers, kindergarteners, and many first graders. I think they’d also be excellent for beginning learners of English (ESL).