educational resources

House Activity Set

04/25/2024 by admin

This delightful 3D House Activity Set will be a hit with your students! The print-ready PDF files include color and black & white House templates, House Game boards, and House Flashcards, giving you all the materials you need to build, practice, and review! Complete instructions included. Be sure to check out the preview!

House Flashcards help you introduce house concepts and vocabulary. House templates allow students to color, label, and fold their own houses. Finally, the engaging House Game is a Battle-ship style game board that will get students talking!

Click here to download now! https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/House-Activity-Set-ESL-ELL-Newcomer-2983461

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’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

Interactive Notebooks (INBs)

05/09/2019 by admin

There came a point where I had to intervene. My students’ notebooks were a disordered mess and their bags, when emptied, were a junk pile of crumpled papers, loose cards, and past games. Taking action, I began to roll out a program using interactive notebooks.

Be sure to check out my post on CVC Interactive Notebook templates!

What is an Interactive Notebook?

You may have seen references to INBs, ISNs, or INs, all of which refer to a decades-long trend in education called Interactive (Student) Notebooks. The movement has its history in a tradition of notebooking, scrapbooking and early educators promoting creativity and interaction in student learning.

Nature journals (advocated by 19th-century British educator Charlotte Mason) provide an early example of interactive notebooks. Students began with blank notebooks and either drew or glued a plant or leaf onto a page. Then they wrote about it, labeled it, or included a related poem or thought. Ms. Mason’s Book of Centuries is another example where students explored each century with timelines, drawings, maps, and facts of interest.

The History Alive! social studies program is seen as the genesis of the contemporary interactive notebook movement. Developed in the 80s and 90s by educators at Teacher’s Curriculum Institute, History Alive! is a series of instructional practices that allow students with diverse learning styles to “experience” history. Beginning with the idea that students should be allowed to construct their own knowledge, the teachers created dynamic and highly interactive teaching strategies.

So, what is it about interactive notebooks that have attracted so many educators? How do they benefit and what can be gained for students and teachers?

Here are 7 reasons to use interactive notebooks in class by Jennifer Smith Jochen, of Smith Curriculum and Consulting, on the Minds in Bloom blog.

Interactive notebooks teach students to organize and synthesize their thoughts.
Interactive notebooks accommodate multiple learning styles at one time in (and out of) the classroom.
Student-teacher-parent interaction is built and strengthened with the use of interactive notebooks.
Students are building a portfolio that allows for teachers to track growth over time.
Interactive notebooks have students create a resource to use as they continue to extend their learning.
Students take ownership of their learning through color and creativity.
Interactive notebooks reduce clutter in the classroom, as well as in students’ lives.

Getting Started

When setting up an INB, whatever the subject, teachers regularly include a cover page, table of contents, a rubric for grading the notebooks, an agreement between student and teacher for the upkeep of their notebooks, and finally, a strategy for dividing the notebook into school terms and/or units taught.

When working with a two-page layout, the right-side pages are often reserved for teacher input (teacher-generated notes and handouts) and student output is on the left side — paralleling right/left brain activity. American educator and Wisconsinite, Angela Nerby, explains the breakdown of the interactive notebooks used in her 2nd-grade classes in multiple step-by-step blog posts at Hippo Hooray Teaching.

Tips for newbies:

Use sturdy notebooks; preferably with sewn-in pages.
Create a model notebook that you can use for planning and demonstration.
Number the pages from the outset so that everyone is on the same page.
Tape or create a large pocket for unfinished page elements.
Tape or hot glue a ribbon bookmark to the inside back cover.
Use liquid glue or tape. Pages glued with glue sticks quickly fall apart.
Have a place for students to access materials like glue, scissors, and paper. Establish a routine for cutting, pasting, and cleanup.
Take students step by step through the layout process with your demo book and sample elements. Stress from the beginning cutting and pasting techniques.
Carry through with the notebook project! The first year is going to teach you a lot about planning, organizing, and executing your INB. Use your demo book to make notes about what worked well and what needs improvement.

To help get you started, download the above templates that include a variety of basic manipulatives in pdf and png formats. They’re free, and please feel free to use them.

On the Flip Side

What interactive notebooks are NOT:

INBs are NOT a replacement for students taking notes. It is a center for interaction.
They are NOT a replacement for a textbook. However, a textbook can’t give you everything you need when teaching. I began using interactive notebooks for topics that were not covered in the textbook: picture dictionaries, songs and chants, sight word practice, extra writing practice, dictation, vocabulary activities, dialogues, clockwork, and cursive writing practice.
Foldables and flip-flaps can be amazing tools but they are NOT what defines an interactive notebook. What makes a notebook interactive is that an active connection occurs between the page and the mind of the student.

Check out the book, Interactive Notebooks and English Language Learners, by Marcia Carter, Anita Hernandez and Jeannine Richison. The authors write about addressing the needs of second language learners and how an “Interactive Notebook can be used to scaffold content to move English language learners (ELLs) to the stage where they are academic language learners (ALLs).”

Making learning fun…

In this video, Nassrin Rabi, an elementary ESL teacher in Tel Aviv, demonstrates creating a prepositions of place page for her students’ INBs. You can check out more of her videos on her Youtube channel.

This is from Victoria of CrazyCharizma, an educator known for her unique and creative materials for your INBs. Download a free version of the typewriters and try them out in class!

Since Charlotte Mason’s Nature Notebooks, and the exploratory work done by the Teacher’s Curriculum Institute, we’ve moved into the digital age — and it’s pounding on our classroom doors. If you work in a blended classroom or teach online, creating online interactive notebooks in Google Classroom helps students negotiate digital tools that are necessary to their academic and professional futures.

Here is a nine-minute video demonstration by David Lee, an EdTech Specialist at Singapore American School, showing his kids how to navigate a digital science interactive notebook.

If you’ve ever been discouraged or at a loss with your students’ notebook habits, take the initiative and give interactive notebooks a try. Yes, they are a lot of work, but the rewards for teachers, students, and parents are worth the effort!

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney

Kinney Brothers Publishing

Bounce Learning Kids

03/01/2019 by admin

This is an interview with Christopher D. Morgan of Bounce Learning Kids with a special lineup of educational products for your regular, special needs, or English language classes. Enjoy!

Q. You have a lot of products in your TpT store. How and why did you get into making education resources?

A. I began making them for my own two children and it developed from there. I’ve always been a hands-on father and I wanted to be involved with my children’s education from the get-go. Right around the time I was using flashcards to teach them word sounds, I went online to find resources to help me. I quickly found the quality of what was out there wanting so I decided to build my own.

Q. What was your very first resource?

A. I wanted to teach the kids the difference between consonants and vowels. The problem was that at that age, the very words ‘consonant’ and ‘vowel’ are themselves difficult words for a small child, which I quickly discovered when I tried to explain this in words. With the kids sporting classic deer in the headlight stares, I decided to ‘show’ them instead of ‘tell’ them. I went to my graphics workstation and fiddled around until I came up with a comb design, which I thought would do the trick. It shows the alphabet twice, once with all the vowels enclosed in a block and once with all the consonants enclosed. The two blocks fit together like two combs. The idea was that it would visually convey the fact that a letter can either be a vowel or a it can be a consonant but not both.

Q. Where did Bounce Learning Kids comes from?

A. Because of the success of my vowels and consonants design, I was spurred on to make more resources. Over the next few months, I churned out lots more of them. Eventually, a parent from one of my kids’ playmates saw some of the resources and suggested I share them so that other parents could benefit from them. I thought nothing of it but quickly found my designs were being well-received. I got so many positive comments, which of course only spurred me on more. Before I knew it, I had around 2,000 designs in my portfolio. A good friend suggested I turn it into a business, and thus Bounce Learning Kids was born.

Q. What makes your products different?

A. I design my products first and foremost to function correctly. They must be visually appealing and interesting. Otherwise, the child simply isn’t going to enjoy using them.

Q. Aren’t all education resources supposed to be that way?

A. You’d think so, but that’s sadly not the case. My kids started coming home from school with worksheets, for example. Frankly, I was appalled at the poor quality of them. When I went online again to try to find better ones, I found it was a common trait almost everywhere I looked. I could find plenty of worksheets, but they were all designed more to get the parents to download them than to work correctly as education resources. Oftentimes I’d find numeracy or literacy sheets, for example, where a couple of clip-art graphics were included to ‘make them look more like children’s resources’ but that was about it. The quality really wasn’t there. They would either be boring and uninspiring or simply ineffective as learning tools – or both! This infuriated me to no end. Once again, I thought I could do better, so I started making my own worksheets but built them from the ground up to function correctly first and foremost. I very rarely ‘pretty them up’ by adding infantile clip-art images. When other people do that, it makes me cringe. I think there’s a real danger of being condescending to the kids by treating them that way.

Q. What makes your resources function better than others?

A. It’s all about making them functional but also visually appealing and interesting. Worksheets (which is just a fancy term for a printed page of information that the child must write onto) fall into two basic categories. They are either ‘instructional’ or ‘testing’. That is to say they either ‘teach’ (convey new information) or they gauge the child’s level of understanding (testing their knowledge). Many of my worksheets both teach and test at the same time. They are also designed to be visually appealing, interesting and, most importantly of all, fun. Who wants to do simple learning by wrote when you can have an engaging and fun worksheet that’s an actual pleasure to complete? If you disguise the learning by encapsulating it in play, it takes the stress out of learning.

Here are some of the Literacy products in my line-up:

Hands-on Reading 2 — Coordinate grids ‘B’

Calendar time ‘E’ — Compound words ‘B’

A versus AN ‘D’ — Apostrophe ‘A’

Q. Do you specialize on Literacy products?

A. I do have quite a few Literacy resource kits in my portfolio, but I have many more products that hit other disciplines as well. At the moment, my resources fall into one of six broad categories:

Numeracy
Literacy
Time
Money
Visual perception
Hand-eye coordination

I currently have over forty separate and distinct Literacy resources, some of which contain over a hundred separate pages of content, and I’m adding to the line-up all the time.

Here are some of my other products just to give you a taste of the range of subjects I cover:

Money search (US) ‘A’ — Number snake H

Maths code 2 ‘A’ — 3D Nets 3 ‘K’

Symmetry fun ‘C’ — Learn to tell the time – Free!

Q. Where do you get your inspirations from?

A. It can come from anywhere. If the kids bring home something from school and I think it could be improved, I sit down and improve it. If I see something online that I think can be done better, I sit down and make something better. Most of the time, however, I come up with ideas that meet a specific need I’m trying to fill at the time. As a graphics artist, I think visually. I’m always trying to find ways to convey information in visual short form. The adage ‘a picture tells a thousand words’ is something I live and breathe.

Q. How do you know if a product is going to work or not?

A. I do a lot of testing. My kids and my wife are my first line of testers. If a new product passes muster with them, I then try them in a classroom setting. Sometimes I need to tweak something. For example, a recent product I made wasn’t clear once printed on a laser printer. Some key graphic elements just weren’t clear enough and I had to make some adjustments.

The biggest factor in determining whether a product is successful or not is whether the kids have fun with them or not. If they don’t have fun, the product doesn’t survive, and I move on to something better.

Being forced to fill out boring worksheets is a terrible thing for a child – especially if they aren’t enjoying themselves. On the other hand, there’s nothing so rewarding for me than seeing the light bulb switch on in a child’s mind when they are actively engaged. I mean really, why should worksheets be boring, right?

Special thanks to Mr. Morgan for his guest post on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog. To see the full lineup of educational materials, you can visit Bounce Learning Kids on Teachers Pay Teachers or visit his website at https://bouncelearningkids.com.

Author and creator of education resources for school children and people for whom English is a second language, Christopher has visited 45 countries to date and has lived and worked in four countries across three continents. He currently resides in the Netherlands but has lived and worked in England, Florida & Australia. He is the author of the Portallas series of young adult fantasy adventure novels. An IT manager by day, Christopher enjoys writing novels and building quality education resources. He is a family man with a wife of over 30 years and two children.

If you are interested in becoming a guest blogger on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog site, please contact us at admin@kinneybrothers. We are always looking for educational content our readers will find useful.

Drills, Dialogues, & Roleplays

11/09/2018 by admin

Materials and content allowing students to engage in ‘real’ communication, or simulations of what conversations may sound like, should be a goal for many language curriculums. Drills that develop into dialogues, which in turn pave the way for roleplays, provide a rich repertoire of practice activities to nudge students toward more meaningful, and consequently, less mechanical communication. In fact, such activities can hold relevance for students at any level of their studies whether they’re beginners, intermediate, or advanced language learners.

Although controlled by the teacher, meaningful drills allow students to provide information in addition to the correct language form, give reason for speaking, and as a result, are more engaging and motivating than mechanical drills.

Let’s differentiate three types of exercises often used in the classroom: drills, dialogues, and roleplays, with each having their own subset of forms.

Drills are a vital part of language study. Simply put, a drill is a type of highly controlled or mechanical written or oral exercise in which students respond to a given cue. Drills often have no context and exist for the sole purpose of practicing targeted skills. They can be practiced in any order without losing the logic of the exercise. Drills are the easiest for teachers to set up and implement and the exercises students are most likely to forget. Why? Because they’re often mechanical and lack meaningfulness. In other words, students are on autopilot. When working with drills, you’ll likely be using one of three types: repetition, substitution, or transformation exercises.

Repetition drills focus on a specific target where the teacher’s language or target text is repeated with no change; think flashcards and pronunciation drills.

Substitution drills give students practice in changing a target word or employ a grammar structure in response to a prompt or cue.

Teacher: Blue.

Student: I like blue.

Transformation drills involve changing the structure of a sentence.

Teacher: I like to eat cake.

Student: I like eating cake.

As necessary as they may be, drills don’t have to be boring or lack meaningfulness! There are a variety of creative and fun ways to liven up your flashcard drill work, making the activities more engaging and memorable for your students. Check out my 50+ Flashcard Activities for lots of ideas to shake up your usual drill routines.

If you think of drills as a pathway to dialogues, it will significantly influence how you prepare and implement both types of exercises.

While they can rely on the components found in drills, dialogues provide context and, if unordered, lose their sense of logic. Dialogues usually present spoken language in a natural or conversational tone and are typically longer than drills. They’re beneficial for developing speaking and listening skills. Like drills, dialogues are usually exercises for guided, rather than free language practice.

Dialogues can fall into two categories: standard dialogues and open dialogues.

Standard dialogues present students with an A B exchange. They are useful for reading, listening, pronunciation, intonation, and other phonological features.

In open dialogues, the teacher provides only one half of the dialogue with students creating the other half. Surveys are a perfect and extremely useful example of an open dialogue format and give students practice in asking and answering questions.

If you choose to write your own dialogues, keep these ideas in mind:

Use “natural” language as much as possible with idiomatic and sociolinguistic phrases relevant to the students’ age and experiences. “Wassup!” may work well with teens but not so much for retirees.

Keep the dialogue exchanges short enough so that students can easily remember, but long enough to provide context. Three to five exchanges with salutations work well.

A simple dialogue can happen anywhere. Allow an extenuating or teacher-directed circumstance like an emergency or other conflict to provide urgency. Delivering the line, “Where’s my phone?” will be quite different in a supermarket as opposed to coming upon an accident.

Depict situations or reasons for a dialogue that are relevant and useful to the learner. Think of how differently young teens and adults may think and talk about a math test, making a reservation, or a fistfight in the cafeteria.

Allow for more meaningful practice with options for substitution within the dialogue.

Here are some ideas when presenting dialogues:

Before presenting the dialogue, introduce the topic of the dialogue by fielding students’ interest or knowledge of the subject. Providing students with pictures that may accompany or are similar to the dialogue, can warm students up with relevant vocabulary or grammatical structures.

Have students listen to the dialogue and explore specifics about what they heard. If you have no recordings, set up two students to read while the rest of the class listens.

Give students only one side of the dialogue and have students participate in reading and listening.

Have students reorder a dialogue that’s been cut up into its individual lines.

Try out your acting skills and use the dialogue as a telephone conversation where students only hear one side of the exchange. Who was on the other end of the conversation? Mother, teacher, or friend? What questions did they ask?

Perform the dialogue in fictional circumstances. How does the same dialogue change in a library as opposed to a crowded cafeteria, or on a cold day in the park as opposed to a sunny beach?

You may be pleasantly surprised at the willingness of students to play and the creativity they will exhibit if you mine dialogues for expressive and more meaningful practice.

As students become more flexible and rely on fewer cues to initiate or carry them through a given dialogue, they are ready to move into roleplaying.

Roleplay is a way of bringing situations from real life into the classroom. Dramatic scripts are simply extended dialogues grouped into scenes! Semi-improvisational exercises where scenarios are presented with specific outcomes but nonspecific language, are excellent roleplay activities. If your students are ready, full improvisation is an especially enjoyable way of getting students to explore a topic, take on specific roles, and employ learned language in a meaningful and expressive way.

Resources

Download these sample business roleplays from Trends, a compilation of readings and exercises for intermediate and advanced learners. Try them out in class or use them as a guide in developing your own roleplays!

Dialogues For Young Speakers provides guided dialogues and surveys that were created with easy and natural language for beginning students. Check out these sample pages and they may spark ideas for your own original dialogues!

If you need basic drills for young students, download these sample drill worksheets from Q&A, a compendium of question and answer drills with simple present through simple past tense worksheets.

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney

Kinney Brothers Publishing

Clock Work

08/25/2018 by admin

Yuki had a green paper watch wrapped around his wrist with the hands of the clock permanently drawn to 3:00. I asked him what time it was. “Oyatsu no jikan!” (Snack time!) he replied. “Oh!” I said. “That’s something to look forward to!”

Yuki couldn’t read a clock yet, but at four years old, his teachers were introducing the concept of analog clocks in a fun way and anchored in a daily event that was important to him.

Those little paper watches are super easy to make and kids really like them. Download a free set of templates by clicking on the image below. Teachers also use these watches for sight-word and CVC word practice!

How and when to begin…

I begin teaching my ESL kids clocks when they start learning in their own language. Because my classes are only once a week for 50 minutes, I regularly teach a little bit about clocks over a very long period of time. Starting with paper watches, I plan ahead by planting seeds for future practice.

For young English language learners, reading, writing, and speaking the time is a convergence of several different concepts and skillsets. Numbers alone can be used to teach most of the language skills necessary for reading digital clocks and speaking the time. Once kids have learned CVC words like six and ten, sight words like one, two and it’s, and CVCe, or long ‘e’ words, like five and nine, reading time as text can begin. As for the concept of reading an analog clock, you can give that up to the culture at large and simply ride closely on its coattails. As your kids learn to tell time at home and at school, be there to support their efforts and begin introducing easy, parallel English lessons.

FYI – In Japan, being able to hear the spoken hourly time and read digital time is part of the first (Bronze) level of the aural Jidou Eiken tests for young English language students. Click the link to learn more and download sample tests. It’s worth investigating if only to learn about the vocabulary required to pass the three-level tests.

Getting ready…

Practicing time can begin very early on. I prefer flashcards to plastic clocks with hands that can be manipulated simply because they don’t break and they aren’t perceived as a toy that older kids may object to. With a good set of clock flashcards, there are numerous games you can play that will make repetition more enjoyable.

Here are a few fun ideas to try in class:

Make sure that clock is part of your primary classroom vocabulary flashcards.
Place a clock image of the time your class will end on a classroom board. Kids will become super clock-watchers.
Set a time for a simple event to happen – like dropping your pencil or clapping your hands. Be sure you’re distracted when the time comes and be surprised when it happens.
Hand out hour flashcards and have students play a simple I Have/Who Has activity. “I have 1:00. Who has 2:00?”
Hand out hour flashcards and have students line up in order of the hours.
Tack hour cards around the room (add half hours, quarter hours, etc. as your lessons progress) and have students individually go to the time directed.
Hand students a stack of clock flashcards and have them sort the cards into time order.
Write digital times on the board and have students match the time with analog flash cards.
Once kids start learning to read time as text, write times on the board and have students match the times with analog cards. Setting this up as a relay brings a competitive and fast-paced edge to an otherwise simple exercise.

Remember, clock exercises are another opportunity to review the challenging numbers eleven and twelve, and later on 20, 30, 40, and 50. If you need a good set of number flashcards, you can download them here for free. If you’re in need of a refresh on your flashcard activities, download 50+ Flash Card Activities for ideas to get you going.

Diving in…

Once students are comfortable with reading simple hours, it’s time to begin doing worksheets. Tack completed worksheets into interactive notebooks so they can be reviewed later. Over time, these worksheets will become an invaluable and easy-to-access reference for future lessons where time is practiced.

If you’re looking for worksheets, here are the first ‘hour’ exercises from my textbook, Clock Work. Download and try them out in class. They’re free and I think you’ll like how the worksheets are differentiated. Click on the image above to visit my web site and learn more about the textbook.

After lots of hour practice, adding half hours is the easy next lesson. From this point, understanding and retention should begin to happen faster. Then, it’s step by step, reviewing and practicing numbers in quarters, tens, and fives for times like 9:30, 3:15, 10:40, and 8:55. To repeat, if you see your kids only once a week, plan on teaching a little over a long period of time, and don’t forget to review. It will add up!

Clock games…

I’d love to hear the approach and activities you use when teaching time to younger students. I have a lineup of games I like to use, like Clock Bingo, Clock I Have Who Has, 4 in a Row, and clock game boards. Clock flashcards and differentiated worksheets provide repetitive practice and handy visuals for explaining time concepts.

Over the years I’ve learned that teaching students how to tell the time in English is not a one-off lesson. From the early skill of reading an analog clock, then reading and expressing time in text, to understanding the language variances of telling time in English, a little at a time goes a long way. Make sure students are solid in the early lessons and you’ll have fewer problems building their language skills later on.

As always, best of luck in your classes!

Donald Kinney

Kinney Brothers Publishing