Fruits & Vegetables

http://www.foodchamps.org

by: Caroline Lamb

Food champs is a great website for fruit and vegetable units with children! They have a wide selection of games dealing not only with fruit and vegetable vocabulary, but also nutrition in general. The way the website is set up allows teachers to have students log in, and then click on the appropriate age level for the games (either 2-5, or 6-8).  Students are given a variety of appropriate games to help them learn the vocabulary words in a written form. The downside, especially for ELL’s, is that the website does not make any noise or speak, so there is no vocabulary pronunciation modeling, or practice with phonemes while reading the word.  So, while this website is ideal for students with an L1 of English, it may not be the best for students or are struggling learning English as their L2. Also, there are probably several other websites out there that offer a much more extensive selection of vocabulary intensive games, while out of the 6 available on the site, only 3 or 4 actually deal with this vocabulary reading and identification directly. Through all of that though, the website still offers a very entertaining and educational selection of games for learners between the ages of 2-8. But if you have a class with an ELL, or several ELL’s, it might be worth looking into a website that includes an auditory component.

http://bogglesworldesl.com/fruitsvegetablesbingo.htm
By: Michael Cousins
This is a great site that plays a bingo game with the learners about the specific topic: Fruits & Vegetables.
There are several aspects about this particular learning activity that makes it especially beneficial to the English language learners. Initially the learners will have the entertainment of participating in a competitive game with the other students. Games that are competitive and involve participation from several students are really educating to new language learners because they have the opportunity to learn from their peers. The great thing about this game is that bingo is really fun and forces you to pay attention. The educator will go to the site and download bingo play cards with either fruits, vegetables or a combination of the both. The kids each get a card and will play against each other to see who fills the bingo card or makes a bingo line first. The teacher will call out a fruit or vegetable and then show a picture of that food to the students. They will then write out the word and the students will match the target word with the same on on their bingo card. The student will learn to associate pictures with with words and learn the sound of the read words. This game could be altered even more specifically for ELLs where the teacher might only call out the word in the L1 or have the bingo cards written in the L1.

http://www.freshforkids.com.au/games/games.html
By: Krista Robinson

For Blog Two I evaluated Fresh for Kids which is a website dedicated to teaching healthy living choices to children and parents. It has a wide variety of games and activities for children too.  My objective for this website was for a student to use it and be able to identify and correctly spell the names of different fruits and vegetables. Of the seventeen games only four of them could have possibly left a student with a better understanding of how to identify and spell the names of fruits and vegetables. These four games are Worm Game, Quiz Game, Word Guess, and Word Match. Since most children would prefer to play games rather than read, I feel that most of the games should have more emphasis on the variety of fruits and vegetables. The information in other areas of the website is geared towards parents and teachers and not children. The section about the different fruit and vegetables is far too long for any child to read through. For these reasons I don't believe this would be a good website for students and especially not English Language Learners. I would maybe use this website for research or activity ideas for my classes but, I would not send my students younger than third grade to use it on their own.