Russell Stannard finds stories for children on the web.
I have now been writing Webwatcher for four years and I am still amazed by the gems I find online. These latest discoveries are perhaps some of the best I have ever found in my years of searching on the internet.
1. www.magickeys.com/books/index.html
You will find a wealth of stories for children here. They require Flash Player, but most modern browsers already have this. If you are lucky enough to have a computer and a screen in your classroom, then you can watch and read the stories as a class. Some of them are interactive, so there are parts where the students have options for how they want the story to continue (get the students to vote on which choice they want to make). Some come with animated pictures with the text below; some have sound and others don’t. If they don’t, then you or your students can read the story aloud.
The Witch’s Stew
I have used the first story on the site, ‘The Witch’s Stew’, in class. This is a great story with plenty of vocabulary – the pictures make explaining it very easy. I read the story out myself and then called out words from the pictures and got students to run to the front and point at them. There was lots of vocabulary to work with, like witch, cat, stew, hat and bowl. Some of the ingredients the witch puts in the stew are quite difficult to teach (and not that useful), so you may want to translate these words or create a worksheet to deal with them before you start. The story has a repetitive element and the students have to keep saying the ‘magic words’. This helps them to follow and engage with the narrative, and though I noticed that they did have problems with some of the vocabulary, they easily followed the story and the lesson was great fun. There was even a moral, as the witch kept forgetting to say ‘please’ each time she tried her spell and so the spells went wrong.
The Farm Animals
This story includes sound. We started by brainstorming all the animals on the farm, writing their names on the board. We then watched the story the first time, just to see how many of the animals we had thought of were actually in the story. I then added the animals that we had not predicted to the words on the board. We then watched the story a second time and I put this table on the board. The students watched the story a third time and matched an animal in the first column with an action in the second column. I then played the story a fourth time and checked each answer as we went through. Next I went through the animals and the activities with the students and made sure they understood them. I then put the students into pairs. Student A had to say the name of an animal and Student B had to say what it could do. (I cleaned the board, leaving only the names of the animals.) After a while they changed roles. This was a useful lesson. The students revised farm animals and extended their knowledge of verbs by expressing what each animal does. I then got them to do some oral practice. The way I structured the lesson meant that they got to watch the story four times. This lesson took hardly any preparation.
Tips for storytellers
- Always watch the story a couple of times yourself first.
- Deal with any awkward vocabulary (like slippery snails, tadpole tails) before you start. You can leave these words on the board to help the students remember them.
- Get the students to engage with the story. (With the first story, they can learn the ‘magic words’ before they start and then say them each time the witch is just about to say the spell.) They can come to the front and touch different things in the picture. You can play ‘true or false’: tell the students that you are going to say things about the story. If they are true, they sit down and if they are false, they stand up.
- If you want to do something really special, print out the ‘Screen Shots’ from the story, put them in random order on the board, number them and get the students to work out what order they should go in.
2. www.sundhagen.com/babbooks/
This site offers a host of stories suitable for primary and possibly early secondary school children. Again, the site is easy to use and well organised. There are no advertisements on the page, just the story and illustration and the buttons to move forward and back. These stories don’t have sound, so you would need to read them out yourself or get the students to read them aloud. You could get the students to watch and read the stories at home and then give them some sort of activity to do (eg some true/false questions, writing a summary of the story, a gap fill to complete, comprehensive questions, re-ordering a series of pictures, etc). This would make setting homework a lot more interesting!
More sources for stories
The internet has many sites which allow you to print out stories and use them in class. However, they are often poorly formatted or include a lot of advertisements. Here are a couple of sites I have used with stories which I find easy to print out and use in class:
http://childhoodreading.com/authors.html www.vtaide.com/png/stories.html
Russell Stannard is a senior lecturer in ICT and course leader for MSc Multimedia at the University of Westminster, UK. He has an extensive publishing background in ELT and is currently working with BBC Worldwide on various CD-ROMs, and with Macmillan Hong Kong on a primary course. He also teaches English and Spanish at Sutton Adult Education College, UK.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 41, 2006
