Kinney Brothers Publishing

ESL Teaching & Publishing

Kinney Brothers Publishing

Free Digital Files for Distance Learning

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Free and Ready!

Not sure how to get started in Google Classroom?  Here are four free files you can download now and try out in your new virtual classroom!  Play games, work with flash cards, or assign work from our digital textbooks!

Click on these links to learn more about Google Classroom, watch an introductory video or read this FAQ.  Anyone with a gmail account can sign up for free!

Donald’s English Classroom has lots of digital files to get you started!  Check out our popular Bingo Games and Flash Cards.  We also have the complete Stories For Young Readers series, Book 1 and Book 2 available.  Download individually or get the discounted Bundles.

Download the files below for free!  Be sure to comment and let us know how you used these files in class!

SFYR BK2 Lesson 1SFYR BK1 Lesson 1 Paperless Resources Kinney Brothers PublishingFree Flash Cards for Distance Learning Kinney Brothers Publishing

UNO

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UNO is a trademarked game from Mattel

Think UNO is just a quiet game of number and color matching?  Think again! 

UNO is a great game for getting your students speaking!  I use it to get my students to practice all of the following language:

  • This is a…
  • That is a …
  • These are …
  • Those are…
  • What is this?
  • What is that?
  • What are these?
  • What are those?
  • Not
  • Colors
  • numbers

Here is an example of how I use it in a class where students are learning to use the basic sentence structure, “This is a …”:

Deal out seven cards to each student and play the game as usual, only students must say what they are laying down.  For example, if a student is going to lay down a yellow 2, she must say, “This is a Yellow 2.”  The play then goes to the next student.  Let’s say he lays down a Green 2.  He must say, “This is a Green 2.”  Play the game in this fashion until one of the students lays down all of the cards in her hand and wins.

The special cards in the deck are as follows:

  • This is a Wild Draw 4
  • This is a Wild card
  • This is a Green Draw 2
  • This is a Red Skip
  • This is a Blue Reverse

When the students start contrasting ‘this’ and ‘that’, bring that to the game.  Now, students must say what the previous student laid down before saying what they are about to lay down:  “That is a Yellow 2.  This is a Blue Skip.”

As the students progress further, the expectations for play expand as well.  For example, when the students are learning plurals, and the contrasting words ‘these’ and ‘those’, support this by incorporating them into the game.  When a student has two or more of the same card in his hand, he can now lay them all down at once, saying, “These are Red 7’s”.  The next student must then say, “Those are Red 7’s before saying what he is about to lay down.  In this game now, students are contrasting ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘these’, and ‘those’.

Have your students learned ‘not’?  Throw it in!  Now when a student lays down a card, she must first say what it is not, and then what it is:  “This is not a Green 9.  This is a Blue 4.”  And for added fun, the students can be allowed to say anything that their card is not:  “This is not a gorilla!  This is a Blue 4.”

And of course, you play the game in which students ask questions too!  In this case, the student would lay her card down and ask the next student, “What is this?”  The next student must answer, “That is a Green 8,” before laying down her own card and asking the next student the appropriate question.

As you can see, there are a lot of options for using UNO to support the language you are teaching.  Give it a try, and let us know how it goes, and how you might have used it differently!  Or maybe you have another card game that you like to use to get your students talking.  Please let us know.  We’d love to hear about it!

Mike

Vexillology

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Sometimes, a teacher has to share with students something that they are really enthused about.  Next to looking at maps, I love looking at flags! International flags display many of the best devices and some of the worst transgressions of flag protocols with some surprising genius in the mix! U.S. state flags are mostly dreary, but a few stand out with pretty stunning designs.  What makes for a quality flag design and why do some fail so badly?

This is one of my favorite TED talks.  Roman Mars is obsessed with flags; a true vexillologist.  He clues you in to the most sublime and some of the worst crimes in flag design.  Warning!  This talk is not safe for young ears!  Mr. Mars has a bit of a pottymouth, but it is so worth watching if you’re interested in flag design!

With Flag Day coming in June (6/14), I put together a lesson in flag design.  From hoist to fly, canton to saltires, the vocabulary of a vexillologist illustrates the construct and the details of flag design.  See why New Zealanders are so vexed about their own flag or which country’s flag has three flags all combined into one!  Do you know which canton is the upper hoist side? This lesson ‘splains it all!  Check out the preview here.  Then download the lesson!

Time for you to be the judge.  Does your state or country have a flag worth sending up the pole or does the sight of it flapping overhead ruin your day? Download this file so that the next time you’re looking at a flag waving in the wind you can decide for yourself if it is a rocking design or something best forgotten.  And better yet, wake up the budding vexillologists in your classroom and give them a Flag Day they’ll never forget!

If you’re interested in more flag fun, check out all the flag games and pennants in Donald’s English Classroom!

Happy Flag Day!

Don

The Oasis of The Seas

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One of the schools I taught at in Japan was an intensive academic prep program for students getting ready to study in universities abroad. 

This is a lesson guide for The Oasis of The Seas from the textbook, Trends, Business & Culture Reports, Book 2. You can download this lesson to try out in class.

In the speaking and listening courses, my job was to get the students talking as much as possible, to work on group tasks, and give presentations.  One of the best tools I had for this was our textbook, Trends, Business and Culture Reports, as it allowed me to have the students run their own lessons.  Here is an example of how I would do it (or rather, how the students would do it) using the reading and exercise pages The Oasis of the Seas.

The day before class I would choose one student to be the “Teacher,” and give him or her the first page of The Oasis of the Seas.  The student was to read the story and prepare to lead the class through the reading and exercises on the page.

Before class the next day, the “Teacher” was to write the questions from the Discussion Questions section on the whiteboard. 

He or she would then greet the students and make small chit-chat with them for a minute or two, asking them how their evening was the night before, etc.  The teacher would then introduce the topic for the day – Traveling – and explain that they were to start by discussing the questions on the board.  He or she would then read each question in turn, and ask the students if they have any questions about them.  If yes, the teacher would answer the questions, and then say, “Okay, let’s go, up, up, up!”, to which the students would stand up, get into pairs, and discuss the questions, the teacher changing the pairs every 10 minutes for a total of 30 minutes discussion time.

The teacher would then have the students sit down and take out a notebook and pen for dictation.  He or she would then ask the students to write the questions as he or she spoke them from the Comprehension Questions section.  The students could ask the teacher to repeat the questions as necessary until they had all of the questions written in their notebooks.

Then, the teacher would explain that he or she was going to read twice the story called The Oasis of the Seas, and that they should listen and take notes on a new page in their notebooks.  The teacher would then read the story twice while the students listened and took notes.  When finished, the teacher would ask the students to get into pairs and work to answer the questions from their notes, stressing that the answers must be complete sentences.    

When the students were finished, the teacher would ask the pairs in turn to read and answer the questions.  The teacher would not let on whether the answers were correct or not, but respond with, “I see,” or “Really?” or “Okay, interesting.”  Then, the teacher would hand out the two pages of The Oasis of the Seas, and ask the students to check their own answers with the reading.  Once this was finished and the questions gone over again to make sure of the answers, the teacher would then ask the students to practice the reading aloud in pairs, working on fluency and pronunciation.

By this time, at least half of the 90-minute class period would be finished, and I would then take over, thanking the “Teacher” for his or her work. 

I would then move the students through the rest of the exercises in The Oasis of the Seas and end with setting up the Presentation Task section, giving them one week to research one of the famous buildings listed in the section, or one of their own liking (no two students could do the same building), and prepare to give a presentation to the class, covering the information asked for, and other information they think is interesting.

If you try this in class, let us know how your students responded.  We’d love to hear from you!

Michael Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing

Selling Wellness

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Health and medicine are major topics in our social and media discussions.  How well your students understand the news articles and conversations happening around them determines the extent to which they can make informed decisions about their well-being.

Of course most beginner-intermediate ESL students have learned about the body, and how to talk about simple ailments, but Selling Wellness, from Trends, Book 2, challenges students to take their skills in reading, listening, and discussion around health and medicine to the next level.  Starting off with a short paragraph on prescription drug sales in the United States, Selling Wellness engages solid intermediate-level students with reading and discussion exercises that center on health and exercise, taking medicine, pharmaceutical advertising, and the growing epidemic of pharmaceutical drug abuse and unintentional deaths by overdose.

Selling Wellness also includes a simple review of body part vocabulary, commonly-used idioms dealing with illness, and a survey exercise that can be used either in-class, or as a homework project.    

The way I run this lesson…

I start off with writing the questions from the Discussion Questions section on the board.  Students stand and discuss the questions in pairs, changing partners every five or ten minutes.

Next, I tell students to take out a notebook and prepare to write the questions from the Comprehension Questions section.  I then dictate the questions, which the students write in their notebooks.

After this, the students turn to a new page in their notebooks.  I then read the report twice, and the students take notes.  Then, students pair up and work out the answers to the Comprehension Questions.

Finally, I hand out the two pages of Selling Wellness to the students, and the students work to check the answers to their questions, and practice reading the paragraph for themselves out loud.

From here I have the students drill each other using the Selling Wellness Drill section.  With this, students change pairs, with one student turning his or her paper over, and the other student asking the questions.  The partner listens closely to each question and gives a full answer.  For example, if the question is, “Are Americans taking less medicine?”, the student should answer, “No, Americans are not taking less medicine.  They are taking more medicine.”  This is a great listening-and-response drill, and it further reviews the information given in the reading.

Next I have the students work out the Identification: Body Parts section, and then move on to the Discussion Exercise 1 section.  For this discussion section, I give the students five or ten minutes to write out their ideas on their own, and then I put them in small groups for discussion.

Finally, depending on the amount of time left in class, I either set the students off to survey each other using the Survey Exercise section, or I assign the Survey Exercise as homework, giving them parameters on how many people they must ask, etc.

Another option for teaching this lesson would be to make it even more student-centered by having the students themselves run the class!  See my blog entry titled, The Oasis of The Seas.

Please share your ideas…

Or maybe you have your own ideas on how to run this lesson.  Please share!   I would love to learn about any other ways you get your students talking and learning about health and fitness.

Michael Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing