TEFL blog » Site reviews

If you teach young learners, you may have used CDRoms and interactive games in your classes.

Well, here’s a new one for you… Dots and Diamond and the case of the Missing Mummies. Dots and Diamond are a dog and cat detective team called in to the museum late at night to help solve the mystery of the missing mummies. Your job is to guide them through the museum, finding clues to help them in their quest. Along the way they learn a lot of new vocabulary and interesting information.

Have a try, see if you can solve the case, then see how much quicker your young learners can do it!

Our site review this week is Ask About English, where ESL students can ask questions about English language or British culture and see their answers posted online by Matt Ford.

Recent questions which Matt has answered include “Let me know the meanings of To kick up a row and its use” and “What’s the difference between as far as and as long as”.

The site also has extensive sections about British culture and humour, with information about everything from pubs to football, chips to the Royal Family, as well as some classic Monty Python sketches…

There are also speaking tips, phrases of the day and info about accents and dialects, including some cockney rhyming slang.

As well as providing some useful and informative ESL answers, this is a very useful resource for students - and teachers - interested in all things British.

Our first site review of the new year is the highly recommended TEFL Logue.

Since August, Katie at the TEFL Logue has provided TEFL teachers with a goldmine of advice and resources. Her informative topics cover everything you might need as a TEFL teacher and more, from interviews with current teachers to branching out from TEFL, practising spelling to stress in the TEFL classroom. If you’ve been a teacher for a while, you’ll especially like her Top 10 clues that you might just work in TEFL.

Topics are organised into easily navigable categories. Each category is packed with articles of such variety that you’re sure to find something that interests you in every one of them.

Katie posts three or four resources every day, so put the TEFL Logue on your must-read list for 2007.

As teachers, we know that teaching grammar can be challenging, and finding new ways to present or practise a language point is not always easy. A few weeks ago we published an article on the site entitled Three Fun Ideas for Teaching Grammar, which gave some fresh approaches and sparked some lively discussion.

Rarely, though, does something as unique and fun as GrammarMan, this week’s site review, come along. GrammarMan is the fantastically inventive creation of Brian Boyd, an English teacher in Thailand.

Brian has created a new superhero whose job it is to defend Verbo City from the enemies of grammar. You can follow his adventures in the GrammarMan comic as he and his helpers battle baddies such as Uncle Uncountable and the Article Ants and solve grammar crime.

The GrammarMan comic allows students to practise and consolidate grammar in a unique and interactive way. If you’re looking for something different for kids and adults alike, something new for homework or for a project, then have a look at this very high quality and well thought out site.

The GrammarMan site not only features all the latest adventures of the superhero in his comic, but also some extra resources like maze games, GrammarMan clipart, film quizzes, reading resources and a webquest, which could be an ongoing project for a young learners class.

You can visit GrammarMan here, and feel free to post a comment below…