Barnaby Bear

This is a website aimed at children 5-7 years who has English language as their mother tongue. However, I find it useful for language learners at the age of about eleven. The website is based on Barnaby Bear and his travels to Australia and Paris. There are also games where the children can practice their English skills and take instructions in English.

The address to the Barnaby Bear website is:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/barnabybear/

How it works
To make this website work the user needs internet connection, the features can not be downloaded and saved to the computers hard drive, but only streamed online. Speakers are also required.

I find two features on the website to be useful for language learners in the Swedish elementary school, that is ‘the stories’ and ‘the games’ sections. ‘The stories’ page has two stories where Barnaby Bear, a cartooned bear from England, travels to Australia and to Paris. The stories are, more or less, travelling guides told in an easy language and are supported by pictures and text, which makes the story fairly easy for language learners to follow. The games are a fun way for the children to learn about everyday life activities at the same time as their English vocabulary grows.

How the website can be used
When using the Barnaby Bear website English class can be integrated with Geography class. The travel guides gives a good introduction to the countries, but the teacher needs to introduce the videos because of new words that can be hard to understand. Before showing the story, the teacher can briefly tell the story, using words that are important for the context, and explain the meaning of them and write them on the board or hand out a glossary list. The children will now have an idea of what the story is about and will have it easier to follow.

The stories give the teacher many opportunities to do follow up tasks. For example the children can get a task of finding more information of a place or something else in the story that they found interesting. They can present their new information by doing a play or telling about it with help of pictures, perhaps making a photo story.

Another task can be to formulate new sentences with key words from the stories that the teacher gives the children. By this, it gives the language learner a greater chance to learn the words.

There is also a section on the website where the children can e-mail Barnaby Bear. The children can formulate a few questions and send an e-mail to him.

The game section gives the children a chance to learn new English words at a fun way. They also learn to take instructions in English. ‘The recycling game’ can be a part of environmental projects and might be a fun way to test their knowledge on how to recycle.

Other contributions
On the ‘Teacher & Parents’ section there are more information about the website and some useful links.
I found The Barnaby Bear website on the Norwegian Schoolnet (www.skolnettet.no), where it was linked. There you can find many links to different websites and to different subjects.

Note! The videos in the ‘videos section’ are only available to users within the UK.