Donald's English Classroom

Supplemental Resources – Planning Ahead

02/05/2020 by admin

In the last two posts, I talked about Stories For Young Readers and the Phonics & Spelling series from Kinney Brothers Publishing. In this post, I’ll focus on supplementary materials and provide links for a closer look at each resource.

A solid textbook series is worth its weight in gold. On the other hand, no textbook can give you everything you need in the classroom. Classes are as different as the students who come to study. Differentiation, age levels, extra and special activities, homework, and assessments are some of the myriad ways supplementary materials serve a teacher in the classroom. Personal and school libraries should have resources that are congruent in content and readily available to meet the dynamic needs of your curriculum.

You’ll find an abundance of supplementary materials that work in tandem with our textbook series. They are available as digital download files in our online store, Donald’s English Classroom, or as printed textbooks from Kinney Brothers Publishing.

Phonics Challenge, Book 1, drills young ESL students in identifying and spelling three-letter (CVC) words through basic exercises, puzzles, and games. Phonics Challenge, Book 2, offers worksheets for identifying and spelling silent ‘e’ (CVCe) words. Each textbook works with a base vocabulary of 80 words. With review pages, game boards, reading, and writing exercises, The two-book Phonics Challenge series will give your students hours of engaging and enjoyable English practice. Check out the previews for Book 1 and Book 2!

Easy Sight Words 1, 2, & 3 drill students in a vocabulary of twenty-five sight words in each textbook. The textbooks offer differentiated exercises for easy writing, word identification, and reading practice. Review pages include primary word building activities, word-order exercises, graphing, word search, game boards, and more! With a focus on contextual language building, the Easy Sight Words series is complementary to any phonics and reading curriculum. Download previews for Book 1, Book 2, and Book 3!

Q&A can be used as a teacher’s resource or as a textbook to provide students with over 200 pages of primary question and answer practice. Students are drilled in basic question forms using do, can, are, is, what, when, how, where, which, and who. The worksheets cover simple present, present continuous, and simple past tenses with language appropriate for beginning ESL students. This is an invaluable resource for every language teacher and school library! Be sure to check out the preview for Q&A!

Clock Work exercises ESL students in the primary skill of reading and understanding analog clocks. Simple, step-by-step worksheets guide students from easy practice to more complex concepts of telling time and language. These basic worksheets are useful for children who are just learning to read clocks thru adults brushing up their language skills. Download the preview for Clock Work here!

Cursive Writing! exercises young ESL students in the primary skill of cursive handwriting. Step-by-step lessons lead students from easy ABC practice to writing longer passages. While building students’ dexterity and recognition skills, Cursive Writing! also introduces students to the pleasure of expressive handwriting. Be sure to check out the preview for Cursive Writing!

If you’d like to learn more about all Kinney Brothers Publishing has to offer, please download our catalogues! Peruse the complete lineup of our Global Edition ESL Textbooks or check out our ESL Store right from your desktop! Sign up for our newsletter and download a free CVC I Have/Who Has Activity Set!

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at info@kinneybrothers.com.

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing
kinneybrothers.com

Stories For Young Readers – Planning Ahead

02/03/2020 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing Stories For Young Readers

No matter the time of year, I get inquiries about the best way to purchase Kinney Brothers Publishing textbooks and downloadable resources. You shouldn’t have to worry about getting the materials you need for your students. We offer many options so you can make the best choices for your classes. Check out these posts if you’re looking for phonics or supplementary materials for your classes.

The Stories For Young Readers series is available in a variety of formats and sources. For online shoppers, this series available through Amazon.com worldwide! In Japan, the series is published by Independent Publishers International (I.P.I.) and available with a special discount through David Paul’s ETJ Book Service. For pdf and paperless downloads, visit Donald’s English Classroom!

The Stories For Young Readers series includes questions, grammatical explanations, exercises, and puzzles for beginning students. The books are designed to extend students’ skills and interest in communicating in English. Teachers can utilize the stories and exercises for listening comprehension, reading, writing, and conversation. Book 1 focuses on present simple and present continuous reading exercises. Book 2 takes students further with simple past, past continuous, and simple future tenses.

Check out the previews or download the first readings from Book 1 and Book 2 for free! They include audio files, answer keys, and dialogues!

Stories For Young Readers Book 1 Kinney Brothers Publishing

You’ll find an abundance of support materials for this series in our online store, Donald’s English Classroom. Visit for downloadable flashcards, charts, games, textbooks, answer keys, and audio files.

Stories For Young Readers Book 2 Kinney Brothers Publishing

You might also be interested in Dialogues for Young Speakers – a series of dialogues and surveys designed to extend students’ conversation skills. Following Stories for Young Readers, the dialogues progress from present simple to present continuous in Book 1, and simple past, past continuous, and future tenses in Book 2. Not only will teachers find a wealth of material that will get students up and talking, the dialogues also prove that students can effectively communicate with even a limited vocabulary. You can download these textbooks online, order directly from the Kinney Brothers Publishing web site, or order on Amazon.co.jp. Download previews for Book 1 and Book 2 here!

Dialogues For Young Speakers Kinney Brothers Publishing

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at info@kinneybrothers.com.

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney
Kinney Brothers Publishing
kinneybrothers.com

Fun Facts About English #42 – Words Spelled With -ough

01/31/2020 by admin

Fun Facts About English 42 Kinney Brothers Publishing

If there’s one thing you learn early in school, it’s that English spelling does not display a one-to-one correspondence with pronunciation. Any expectation that it should will drive you crazy.

Words spelled with the same letter combination but pronounced with different sounds are due to a combination of different etymologies and evolving sound changes. Many like words started out with the same or similar pronunciations and diverged over time.

In Middle English, where the –ough spelling arose, it was pronounced with a velar fricative or x sound (e.g., [oːx], [oːɣ], [uːx], or [uːɣ]). Currently, the spelling has at least eight pronunciations in North American English and nine in British English; with the most common being:

/oʊ/ as in though (cf. tow)
/uː/ as in through (cf. true)
/ʌf/ as in rough (cf. gruff)
/ɒf/ as in cough (cf. coffin)
/ɔː/ as in thought (cf. taut)
/aʊ/ as in bough (cf. to bow [the gesture])

“Slough” alone has three pronunciations depending on its context and meaning:

/sluː/ (cf. flu) as in, “slogging through a slough of mud”
/slʌf/ (cf. off) as in “to slough off”, meaning to shed off
/slaʊ/ (cf. how) as in the town of Slough in England

There have been attempts to rein in the confusion. Formal and informal spelling reforms are generally more accepted in the United States than in other English-speaking countries. Dialects with traditional pronunciation or old-world spellings keep the debate on ‘correctness’ alive.

North-East Scottish dialects still pronounce trough as /trɔːx/ (traux)
In the UK, the word dough can be pronounced /dʌf/ (duff), as in duffpudding
The word enough can be pronounced /ɪˈnaʊ/ (ow) or /ɪˈnoʊ/ (oh) and the spelling enow is an acceptable dialect or poetic spelling (e.g. “And Wilderness is Paradise Enow.“)

Still, some formal spelling reforms have caught on:

hiccup instead of hiccough
hock instead of hough (rare in the U.S.)

Some spellings considered unacceptable in other areas, are standard in the United States:

naught or not instead of nought
plow instead of plough
donut instead of doughnut
slew instead of slough

Informal spellings are generally considered unacceptable anywhere except in signage or the most casual and texting conversations:

thru instead of through: as in “drive thru” or “thru traffic”
tho and altho instead of though and although
’nuff instead of enough

So, what is the best way to help our young learners navigate this unpredictable spelling map? Reading. Instilling a love of reading is one of the best ways to focus the attention on the differences and create a memory of written words. Teach students to take pleasure in the differences and develop an appreciation of the rich history of the English language. And remember, it will never stop evolving!

Editor’s Note: David Olsen, a contributor to A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia, states that slough does not provide a unique pronunciation for -ough, but that hough (pronounced hock) is a Scottish word, meaning the ankle joint of a horse, cow, or foul, or to hamstring, or it is an obsolete British word meaning to clear the throat. Olsen says that in order for the sentence to have 9 different ways of pronouncing -ough, it could be rewritten as: A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed, houghed, and hiccoughed. On the same website, R. E. Davies writes, “Hock [is] well known in Ontario, Canada, where the phrase ‘hock a loogie’ is alive and well.”

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in the conundrum with spelling irregular plurals, all the ways to spell long ‘e’, or why Chicago was originally spelled Stktschagko!

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English

Kinney Brothers Publishing Communication Series includes downloadable color and black and white textbooks, teacher’s answer keys, and audio files! Presented in clear, grammatically simple, and direct language, the series is designed to extend students’ skills and interest in communicating in English.

Fun Facts About English #41 – Sundials

01/24/2020 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing Fun Facts About English

To understand the sense of time used throughout the ancient and medieval world, you have to forget about our contemporary clocks and their hours, minutes, seconds, mechanical ticktocks, and alarms. Imagine your waking day, sunrise to sunset, along with your sense of passing time, guided solely by the sun and the shadows it casts throughout the day.

Ancient Sundials Kinney Brothers Publishing — Clockwise from top: early Greek sundial; Roman sundial, Pompeii; Sundial stone, Kilmalkedar, Ireland (c. 7th century AD); Medieval (Carolingian Renaissance) sundial

In the days of shadow clocks, the unit of time was a moment (momentum), or the discernible movement of the gnomon’s shadow on a sundial face. A moment was approximately 90 seconds with 40 moments in a solar hour. The hour was further divided into four puncta (quarter-hours) and ten minuta. Of course, a solar hour depended on the length of the day, which, in turn, depended on the season.

Butterfly Sundail — Late 17th century Butterfly sundial

From the earliest sundials around 1500 BCE through the middle ages, sundials became increasingly sophisticated and served a number of important functions for ancient and more recent civilizations. With Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and Muslim innovations, early civilizations were able to keep exact records of past events and plan for future ones. Not only could they track the seasons, solstices, and equinoxes, they could formalize governmental, religious, and societal activities with a unified schedule. Even with the 14th-century introduction of clocks and their base 60, or sexagesimal system (hours, minutes, and seconds), sundials were still relied on and more reliable for resetting the newfangled mechanical clocks when necessary.

Traditionally, sundials were engraved with proverbs and mottos that invited passersby to reflect on the passing of time, the shortness of life, or random humorous anecdotes.

Let others tell of storms and showers, I tell of sunny morning hours.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in reading about words that were originally trademarks, what the word dumbbell actually means, or universal words that spread around the world!

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The Kinney Brothers Publishing blog brings you topical information, helpful teaching tips, and fun activities you can bring to your ESL classes. We value the experience and advice of teachers and welcome your comments and suggestions!

Fun Facts About English #40 – The Letter ‘s’

01/17/2020 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing Fun Facts About English 40

There are more English words beginning with the letter s than with any other letter mainly because of clusters such as sc, sh, sp, and st. Followed by some distance are words that begin with p, c, d, m, and a.

According to Wolfram Language, a computational knowledge engine, in a list of 40,127 common words, s has 4,635 entries – as compared to x which only has 11. This simple Wolfram word cloud expresses the most frequent initial letters in the English language:

Bear in mind that the frequency of initial letters has no relationship to how often letters occur in English in general. E is the most common letter, followed by t and then a.

If you enjoy learning fun facts about the English language, you may be interested in reading about The Power of X, why Americans say /zee/ when the rest of the world says /zed/, or how the ampersand (&) was once part of the English alphabet!

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Donald's English Classroom Fun Facts About English 40

Add punch to your classroom decor! Visit Donald’s English Classroom for wall maps and wall art, charts, pennants, and so much more!

Fun Facts About English #39 – The English Alphabet

01/10/2020 by admin

Fun Facts About English 39 Kinney Brothers Publishing

History of the Latin Alphabet Kinney Brothers Publishing

In brief, the English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum. The Latin word originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος (alphabētos). Alphabētos was made from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet; aleph, (ox), and bet, (house). Wikipedia

Map of Phoenicia Kinney Brothers Publishing

Phoenicia was an ancient Semitic speaking Mediterranean civilization that originated in the Levant (west of the Fertile Crescent), in modern-day Lebanon that included coastal Syria and northern Palestine. The civilization advanced across the Mediterranean between 1500 BC and 300 BC.

Developed around 1050 BC, the Phoenician alphabet was spread by merchants and became one of the most widely used scripts in the Mediterranean world. This was in contrast to other contemporary writing systems such as Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Phoenician script was made up of only a couple dozen distinct letters and was simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage of the Phoenician alphabet was that it could be used to write different languages as it was one of the first scripts to record words phonemically.

In Greece, the Phoenician script was modified and vowels were added. In the archaic and early classical years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet until they were replaced around 400 BC by the classical 24-letter Euboean alphabet that is the standard today.

Greek Pottery Kinney Brothers Publishing — Early Greek Alphabet Wikipedia

The Euboean form was carried by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula where it gave rise to a variety of alphabets used to write the Italic languages. One such variant was developed by the Etruscans, a civilization of central Italy. The Etruscan abecedarium evolved into the Classical Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire. After the fall of the Roman state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. Lowercase letters were adopted in the Middle Ages. The script came into use for descendant Latin (Romantic) languages and then for most of the other languages of Europe, including English.

If you enjoyed reading this post, you might also be interested in learning more about the Old English adoption of the Latin script, why Great Britain means “land of the tattooed,” or why the feminine word widow is so unique in the English language!

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From pre-k through adult language learners, Kinney Brothers Publishing offers you textbooks and supplemental materials for your ESL classes. Download these textbooks (and more!) as PDF files from Donald’s English Classroom!