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Spanish

ANTON: Free Digital Activities and Games for K-8 Students

by Miguel Guhlin April 27, 2023

written by Miguel Guhlin

ANTON is at first glance, a German-based free learning app now available in the United States. The system works on a variety of devices, including Chromebooks. With over 200 interactive exercises for students in grades K-8, you can make your free account now.

“As a teacher, this app is excellent! Easy to use with scaffolded exercises to progress students through a variety of standards and skills. Visually it is not overwhelming while still engaging and has games. I love the multiple response types and organization of content. I highly recommend this app for continued support across learning standards.”
– U.S. Teacher

That’s 200+ exercises for each school subject, from math to language arts to science, and more. Plus, there is multi-language content aligned to state standards, including Texas.

Let’s dig a little into Anton to learn more about it.

ANTON login processes — Overview of New Account Creation Process for a Teacher

Wait, What About Student Privacy?

Worried about creating an account and compromising student privacy? No worries, teachers and students can create accounts without giving out personal information. If you’re a teacher, you can create a classroom and assign exercises to your class. You can even check student progress. It also appears that Anton does not use login authorization through popular services. Those services include Google, Facebook, etc.

What’s more, ANTON meets the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). It also adheres to European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). And, more important for some, it is free from advertising. All data is deleted after 12 months of no use (unless you have an ANTON-Plus school contract).

ANTON getting started quick guide for teachers

When I signed up for an account, I provided an email and a password. I did not see an option to skip providing my email address or school location. Students would be asked to provide a nickname, a school, and at which subject they would like to start. Students who are at least 16 years of age may enter their email address or mobile phone number in the Settings of the app.

Screenshot by author with permission of publisher

Aligned to Texas Standards

ANTON is also aligned to Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills. Here’s a quick example as an animated GIF:

Here’s a short video overview (updated):

A Short Introduction

“This app has everything. For a free app, it teaches and lets your student practice and then test what they learned,” said one teacher. You can get started with a free teacher account, choosing from human or monster avatars. Once you create your class, students can connect and start to work inside ANTON. It works as a learning management system, allowing teachers to track student progress. These features make grading and offering feedback easy. This video provides a quick overview of the login process:

You can find more relevant videos about how to use and navigate ANTON online. Here are a few you can explore right away:

Don’t be afraid to explore. Get started now.

Anton grade 1 math activity with subject menu

Grades and Subjects Available

“I like the way ANTON breaks down a lesson into very small steps but builds the lesson back up with more info with each step taken making it easier to understand the concept,” said a classroom teacher. There are a lot of amazing subjects you can access in Anton. Each is replete with instructional activities that include images and sound, like this science activity for grades 3-5:

Here’s a quick video tutorial:

Subjects addressed for K-8 include:

English/Language Arts: reading, phonics, the alphabet, grammar, and more.
Math: numbers, counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and geometry.
Science: plants, animals, the solar system, and more.
Music: instruments, melody, rhythm, and reading music.

Of course, Spanish and other languages are included, as is social studies.

ANTON Games

Love to share games with your students? ANTON offers quite a few. Every time students finish a lesson, they earn a gold coin. These coins can “buy” games that students can play. A few games from the long list include:

Hidden
Sports: Long Jump
Astro Bang
Avatar Superstar
Bat Cave
Block Puzzle

There are many more games in ANTON that students can play. Of course, they can only do so after completing an exercise.

Is It ALL Free?

While ANTON appears to offer a lot of value at no cost, you can choose to use ANTON-Plus, a paid service. This paid service offers additional functions. In the Terms of Service, you can read:

2.8 Schools can purchase an ANTON school license and thus unlock additional functions that improve their use in school. In addition to the ANTON school license, schools can also activate ANTON-Plus for all school students and teachers.

A teacher could adapt the use of the free activities for the classroom, as well as assign them to students. Given that the activities range from K-6, the content is easy to work through.

“Intuitive app, easy to use, and creative exercises for easy understanding and learning,” reported one educator. ANTON is also available via the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, and/or Amazon Appstore. If you need a cross-platform app that works in the browser, ANTON meets your needs there as well.

Try it for yourself and then watch the fun and learning begin!

This blog entry was updated with new content on 10/14/2024.

April 27, 2023 0 comment

Communication Culturally Responsive English Language Arts ESL/ELL Foreign Language Music Spanish

Three Online Public Radio Search Tools

by Miguel Guhlin January 27, 2023

written by Miguel Guhlin

This past holiday season, I spent some of my time listening to music from around the globe. I didn’t have to pay a cent for it, and what fun to explore the world in an interactive audio map. Wish you had a way to listen to music from around the world? Explore online public radio with one of these tools.

Why Listen to Public Radio in the Classroom?

EdSurge offers a few compelling reasons that go beyond it being pleasant:

Listening is a great mode of delivery for informational “texts.” Public radio stories can be a great example of spoken academic language.
You can hear and interpret emotions, which gives students a powerful connection to the speaker.
Radio announcers use techniques in their voicing that keep you listening. They create drama with their voice.

Be sure to read the complete article for more reasons why. Others suggest that listening to radio announcers and audio content can help you learn a language.

Tool #1: Radio Garden

Radio Garden makes it easy to explore audio around the world. You can click and drag the world map on your screen to place a circle anywhere in the world you want. Here’s what that looked like as I was listening to music from Spain:

This service is a nonprofit Dutch radio and digital research project. The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision developed Radio Garden from 2013 to 2016. It was a project of The Transnational Radio Knowledge Platform and five other European universities (source). You can add your favorite stations to a list or bookmark them in your browser. Additionally, you can share the link to the station on Twitter, Facebook, or via email.

This site is hours of fun. I ended up visiting many locations around the globe to listen to music in English, Spanish, and others. You can guess what language I was listening to with this picture:

Give it a try.

Tool #2: Radio.net

Radio.net makes it easy to find public radio stations online, albeit in a less interactive way than Radio Garden.

You can type in the name of the desired country and get a list of public radio stations to explore.

This site works more like a search engine, making it easy to locate the public radio stations you want. You will be listening to music pretty quickly after you begin your search, though.

Tool #3: FMRadio Online

Another amazing music finder is FMRadio Online, which lets you surf via radio stations in the United States. But there’s more!

You can find radio stations by country flag, getting a list of radio stations for each country. I found myself captivated by local radio stations in Costa Rica, including classic songs. For any globe-trotter, a world of audio and music lies at your fingertips via your web browser.

Bonus Tip

Want to record audio from an internet radio station or any audio on your computer? Why not give Audacity a try? Look for a brief tutorial post on how to get it done next week.

Feature Image Source

Screenshot by author

January 27, 2023 1 comment

Back to School English Language Arts ESL/ELL Foreign Language Good Teaching Spanish

Three Editable Back To School Activities For Language Development

by Emily Horn July 20, 2022

written by Emily Horn

It’s almost time for back to school. Can you believe it? I sure can’t. Summer has flown by, as per usual, but I sure hope yours has been fantastic.

Teaching Vocabulary in the Early Years

With the first few weeks of school in mind, I’ve created these three editable activities specifically for preschool to kindergarten grade levels to reinforce school vocabulary. Why the focus on language here? Students must have a solid vocabulary base to support reading comprehension. So working on building vocabulary with early emergent readers is vital to the development of reading skills and the love of reading.

Second Language Development

These activities can also be used for second language learning and vocabulary acquisition. For example, they’re great to use in bilingual or dual language classrooms. Since the teachers can share these items and use them in their language of instruction, these games can greatly aid in language transfer between two (or more) languages.

Three Back to School Activities

Take a look at these ready-to-use bingo cards, flashcards, and “I Have, Who Has” game cards. You can edit these activities to add or change anything you see fit. I purposefully didn’t include words on these cards since the focus is oral language, but once you are working on letter-sound correspondence (like beginning sounds, etc.), you can certainly add the text. Additionally, you can replace my photos with photos you (or the students) take of these items in your classroom.

Unpopular opinion alert! There are some truly beautifully made, very cute templates and resources out there, and I appreciate them. But I did not make these activities very cute (outside of the title page) on purpose. Because I don’t believe that students really need them to be or that it really helps the learning. In fact, keeping things plain and simple is often best, especially for young students learning foundational oral language and reading skills.

Here is the school supply vocabulary I used:

Tape
Colored Pencils
Chair
Folder
Stapler
Pencil Bag
Trash Can
Binder
Water Bottle
Recycle Bin
Eraser
Whiteboard
Backpack

Paint Brushes
Clipboard
Glue Stick
Markers
Book
Notebook
Paper
Table
Paint
Pencil
Crayons
Scissors
Glue

Back to School Supplies Flashcards

When introducing vocabulary, I liked to use real objects or flashcards with real photos of the objects on them. Here are very simple flashcards that can be used in a variety of ways.

Ideas for Using these Back to School Flashcards:

Mystery Box: I loved using the mystery box to introduce new vocabuarly. I would sing a little mystery box song (that I completely made up) and pull a card out of the box for the students to identify. When I was teaching pre-K students, this was one of their favorite things.
Matching/Memory Game: Print out two sets of cards and place them all face down. Have students take turns turning over two cards at a time. If the two cards chosen match, they can be left face up. If the two cards do not match, they should be turned face down. Continue until all matches have been found.
Kim’s Game: Place three cards in front of a student face up. Have the student close his/her eyes. Remove one card from the group. When the student opens their eyes, ask them to tell you which card is missing. This game can be differentiated by varying the number of cards, the number of cards you remove, and by mixing the cards up after you remove cards.
Supply Hunt: Have students draw a flashcard from the mystery box and then find the object(s) in the classroom. This is a great way to help students get to know where supplies are!

Access the Flashcards Template Here

Back to School Supplies Bingo

Get out some beans, counting bears, counters, or counting bugs, and play back to school bingo with your young learners. Five cards are included in this template, but you can certainly add more by duplicating sheets and moving around (or adding to) the images to make the new cards unique. I loved playing bingo in small groups, and I often used it as an informal assessment for listening comprehension and took anecdotal notes. Can students identify objects when they hear the vocabulary word? This game will show you. You can use the flashcards as support for language learners when playing this game (but only if needed). If a student needs support, just say the word, hold up the flashcard, and encourage the student to say the word and find the image on their card. This is a game that can really be used with any vocabulary, including numbers, shapes, and colors!

Additional Back to School Bingo Ideas:

School People Bingo: Switch out the images with pictures of classmates, teachers, and school staff to help students get to know each other and those around them.
Classroom Jobs Bingo: Use the images you have on the jobs chart to help familiarize students with the classroom jobs.
Around School Bingo: Use images of various spots on campus (cafeteria, playground, classroom, library, etc.) and in your classroom (centers, carpet, small group table, etc.) to help students recognize and learn school spaces.

Access the Editable Bingo Template Here

“I Have, Who Has?” Cards

This game was a favorite in my pre-K classroom. It really motivated students when it came to speaking! Just follow the instructions below with your small group, and let the speaking, listening, and vocabulary reinforcement begin.

Access the “I Have, Who Has” Game Template Here

Do you have other ideas for ways to use these three activities for back to school bonding and language acquisition? Please share with us in the comments.

July 20, 2022 0 comment

English Language Arts ESL/ELL Foreign Language Spanish

28 Free QR Code Read Aloud Cards – in Spanish!

by Emily Horn May 6, 2022

written by Emily Horn

I’m back with more read alouds. This time- in Spanish! These 28 stories are available thanks to Scholastic Storybook Treasures, and they have stories in Mandarin as well. If you’re teaching Spanish as a second language, teaching in a bilingual setting, or if you have Spanish-speaking students in your class, you might find these useful. If you read my previous QR code blog article, I gave some tips for in-class read alouds and listed ideas for using the QR codes in class for independent reading. Those ideas also apply here!

What Works Well

I like these read alouds because they are visually pleasing. The images are animated and interesting, and the speaking is very clear and at a decent rate. They provide a good model for fluent reading and pronunciation in Spanish. No doubt they will be interesting for students!

Even Better If

These videos would be even better if they had closed captioning for accessibility and to allow students to see the words as they were being spoken. This would help with word recognition, vocabulary, and letter-sound correspondence. If you watch these directly on Youtube, be aware– there are a lot of ads. Nevertheless, these do provide a good option for independent Spanish read alouds in the classroom. But there is a trick for eliminating those ads using Wakelet! Don’t know what Wakelet is? No problem. Check out this great article. To prevent students from having to watch ads, I went ahead and placed them in Wakelet for you.

Removing Ads and Creating QR Codes in Wakelet

You can place each video link in a separate Wakelet collection and set the privacy for each collection to be “unlisted.” Then, for each collection, click “share” and chose the QR code option. I saved the QR codes as images to my laptop. Here’s a quick one-minute video tutorial.

The QR Code Cards

Download QR Codes to Spanish Read Alouds

I hope you find this Wakelet tip helpful and that you and your students enjoy these 28 FREE QR Code Spanish Read Alouds! Happy reading (and listening).

May 6, 2022 3 comments