ESL

 

Spelling Patterns

l and ll

oy and oi

ph and th

ei and ie

 

  Other Word Based Activities

 

 

  • Look, cover, write, check - Toftwood Infant School
    An interactive version of 'Look, cover, write and check' aimed at primary school children. The vocabulary selection is limited, but would be suitable for an Entry Level learner.

 

 

  • WritingFix4Kids provides great writing topics and ideas for kids who enjoy writing. Choose a game to play. Links to many other interactive games.

 

 

 

  • Look, cover, write, check - Ambleside C. E. Primary School
    Another interactive version of the 'Look, cover, write and check' method which is created for and by the children at Ambleside Primary School. While aimed at primary school children you can generate a word list by spelling patterns, or by topics such as science or geography.

* When to double the final consonant
If you're not sure whether to write 'running' or 'runing' or 'biggest' or 'bigest', try this link.

* Spelling plurals
This has clear tables which show you how to spell plurals such as 'thieves', 'ladies' and 'potatoes.'

* English Homophones
This page has an enormous table of homophones.  These are words with different meanings and spellings but which sound the same.

 

 *Colorful Poems: Read to you with long vowels; needs flash

 *Wordblender: Clusters of words

 *Star Words: High frequency words; needs flash

  * Magic Pencil: Need to download Real Player~Takes a while, but then you get access to being able to write blends.

  * Sandcastle Quiz: Phonics game with phonemes

   Little Animals Activity Center

Grammar and punctuation

* Webgrammar
This site contains a 'grammar basics' section with information on parts of speech, confusing word pairs, common mistakes and idioms.  It also has a section on writing which contains many links to grammar and writing sites.  It takes a while to work out what's in there.

** The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation
This is an on-line grammar and punctuation book.  Click on the grammar or punctuation links on the left side and then the particular point you're interested in, e.g. commas.  You get a list of rules, exercises with answers and tests with answers.  These are not interactive.

** Common Errors in English
Follow the link to the page, ignore all the writing and click on 'go to errors' at the bottom of the page.  A list of common errors, such as 'accept/except' and 'I me myself' comes up and you can click on the ones you want to know more about.

*** The 'tools' of writing
This is the part of the excellent Open University's website on 'The Effective Use of English.'  There are pages on paragraphs, sentences, grammar, punctuation, vocabulary, learning new words, spelling strategies and rules.  Tons of information and some online activities.

**Online Writing Lab (Owl)
A very useful site with information about punctuation, capitals, spelling rules, sentence construction and grammar.  There are some exercises with answers, which can be printed off.

**Parts of speech quiz
If you want to learn and practice your nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs etc. this is a good site.  It will quiz you and give you information if you get stuck.

Vocabulary and Dictionary Skills

**Wordsmyth
Type in the word you are looking for and it will define it.  If you aren't sure of the spelling it will bring up a list of possibilities.

** Dictionary/Thesaurus.com
This is an online dictionary and thesaurus at your fingertips.  It's much quicker than using a proper dictionary and has other useful sections such as a translator, a written style guide and a games and puzzles section.

 

Various Quizzes

*** Interactive Quizzes
This contains about 170 grammar, punctuation, spelling and vocabulary quizzes.  All the quizzes are interactive, so you can quickly check your answers.  If you need more information about rules, you can click on 'Guide to Grammar and Writing' at the bottom of the page to find out about a particular point.  Some of the questions are difficult and some of the rules are hard to understand because they go into such detail.  Apart from that, it's a great site.

*** QUIA
If the site above seemed too difficult, this might be the one for you.  It contains various games, such as matching, quizzes and concentration (where you turn over cards to find pairs) to help you with your spelling, punctuation and grammar.  If you like it, you can even create your own activities, which might end up being published on their web page.

 

ESOL resources (for students whose first language is not English)

*Teacher's Page also has ESL

 

***Fun EFL / ESL Lesson Worksheets
Original, supplementary, multi-level worksheets to make learning English FUN!

*** ESL KidStuff
Resources for kids teachers. Over 1,000 original flashcards, hundreds of printable worksheets, games, teaching tips and more! A must see site!

*** ESL site for learning English

Fun language-learning site with loads of activities for realtime chat, Flash games for young learners, flashcards, phonics, and more. They have received the Netscape DMOZ Cool Site Award for the ESL category; publishes hundreds of quality pages each month, and  are 100% free and non-commercial.

 

*** Self study quizzes for ESOL students
This is a site full of grammar and vocabulary quizzes for students whose first language is not English.  It has masses of material.

**English online
Good EFL (English as a Foreign Language) site with some fun games.

**English zone
Another good EFL site divided into areas such as vocabulary, idioms, reading, spelling, reference etc.  Plenty of interactive quizzes.

*** Virtual Language Center
This is an excellent site from Hong Kong.  Have a good look round as it's full of  information, reference tools, games and activities.  Try storyboard and listen to a song or conversation and fill in all the missing words.

* Cambridge sample materials
Here you can sample some good interactive ESOL activities, such as phrasal verb practice.  Excellent stuff but not much of it.

General

*** BBC Skillswise
A great new BBC site full of worksheets, fact sheets and fun on-line games and quizzes to help you learn and practice spelling, punctuation, grammar, reading comprehension etc.  Excellent, but a bit slow to load.

***Manchester City College
Contains many useful resources and links to help students develop their basic skills.  Check out the 'English' materials in the 'Interactive Activities' section.  Materials are cross-referenced to the Adult Literacy Core Curriculum.  

***Abingdon and Witney College
Another excellent basic skills college website containing many useful materials and links.  Aimed more at tutors than students, it is mapped to the Adult Literacy Core Curriculum and has lots of printable resources.

top of page

* Good

** Very good

***Excellent!

 

Proverbs - Put these proverbs together - Internet Explorer 4/5 only

Adjectives, Nouns, Verbs & Prepositions - sort the words - Internet Explorer 4/5 only

Word Finder - how many words can you make?  

Word Finder 2 - how many words can you make?

Sentence Sorter - Can you make a sensible sentence?

 

Homophones:

there, their, they're

Easily confused words

Easily confused words II

These get mixed up:

are, our, hour

Super Spelling Test

 

Plurals Quiz

 

Literacy Quiz

Thank you to the following websites:

Ambleside School!!

Literacy Links from the Learning Zone

 

Always updating this site!

 

As of October 6, 2002