The Catholic School’s Cluster has provided resources to help children in school with English as an additional language. As part of this support an EAL consultant, Samia Malik, has worked with the school on a regular basis to advise staff on relevant EAL issues and to assess children’s needs.
Resources
The following two websites are free resources which may be useful for parents/pupils who have English as an Additional Language
World Stories is a growing collection of stories from around the world which are freely available online. The collection includes retold traditional tales and new short stories in the languages most spoken by children in our school.
These languages include
Akan Albanian Arabic Bengali Cantonese Danish English Filipino
French German Greek Gujarati Hindi Javanese Kannada Korean
Mandarin Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Somali
Spanish Tamil Turkish Urdu Welsh Yoruba Zulu
The books in these languages are translated into English, and you can download text as well as audio/MP3 of someone reading the book in both languages. It is a very useful collection for our students who are learning their first language as well as English, and may also be useful for parents who are learning English. There are also areas for parents and teachers with more information and exercises.
You can click on the above language, or go to the home page of the site at www.worldstories.org.uk
Language of the Month
Language of the Month is a project run by Newbury Park Primary school. It is a free computer program which contains interactive videos of children teaching their home languages. It includes most of the languages above and also Malayalam, Thai, Sinhala, Shona as well as lots of others. It has activities and information for parents and schools.
