Friday, August 30, 2013

Free Clip Art for Teachers: Forest Animals

When educating kids lots of teachers add visuals to their teaching materials. It's kind of important because little children learn things about the world mostly from visual perception of objects around them. It is not always possible to show real physical objects or living beings in the classroom, and describing them with mere words without showing at least a simple picture may be a futile attempt to teach something to little ones. Necessity of visual materials like clip art and flashcards is a fact of life for preschool teachers like myself. After all pictures are a great fun for children and having fun during lessons with small kids is a key to the educational success. Unfortunately, not all my fellow teachers and parents can draw and use graphic editing software or have high quality clip art available for them free of charge. That's why I decided to share some free educational clip art I have in my teacher's collection. In my first post related to clip art I would like to share a few cute cartoon images drawn by my husband for my forest animals song video.


My husband is not a big artist but at least he can draw better than I can and his drawings are just good enough to be used for my English lessons with kindergarten kids. You too can use these kid-appealing pictures for creating your own worksheets, flashcards, posters, games, newsletters, PowerPoint presentations, homework pages, school websites and other teachers' stuff to make your lessons and overall teaching activities more informative, engaging and fruitful.

Well, as I said in this first clip art post I offer my fellow educators some royalty free pictures of funny looking cartoon forest animals including bear, beaver, bird, butterfly, deer, fox, frog, hare, hedgehog, mole, snake, squirrel, and wolf.

cute cartoon wolf clip art
Cartoon wolf clip art

Monday, August 26, 2013

Phonics Cards (Short U Sound)

This is the last post with my short sound phonics cards. This time it's the short [ʌ] sound. The set consists of 16 phonics cards for reading and practicing this sound.


Сards №№ 57-67 include such phonograms as -un, -ut, -ug, -um, -ub, ud, -up, -uck, -unk, -ump, -ust. Card № 68 presents some cases where the letter Uu is read as [ʌ] in the middle of the word, while card № 69 contains words with the same sound occurring in the beginning of the words. Card № 70 has words where the letter Oo is read as [ʌ], and cards №№ 71-72 introduce reading rules for vowel digraphs oo and ou.

phonics flashcards for ESL short u sound
Phonics flashcard: short [ʌ] sound

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Ocean Animals Worksheets

Following my previous post dedicated to the “Deep in the Ocean, Deep in the Sea” song, I would like to continue sharing some printable teaching materials complimenting the song. In this post I offer you, my fellow English teachers, a few worksheets on the marine life. As usual I suggest using my worksheets while learning the vocabulary related to sea and marine animals using the lyrics of my song which you can find in the video below.



Handwriting Worksheets


This time I prepared some assignments for fine motor skills training. There are four sea animals handwriting worksheets where children must trace and write the words which occur in the song. The first worksheet contains such words as ocean, deep, blue, cool, water, diver, swim.

sea animals trace words handwriting worksheet
Sea animals handwriting worksheet