Good luck to the Coetzees!

One of Interactile Learning's chief writers and bosses has decided to head back to South Africa with his family to start a new life. Pierre's involvement with Interactile will not change and he will continue to help us write awesome products only from a different continent. We headed out for some Taiwanese grub as that will be in short supply when him and his family make it home.


From left to right: Ivy (designer), Leighton (writer), Aldan (trouble maker), Pierre (boss), Catherine (restaurant critic), Thalia (white mouse), Quintas (trouble maker's assistant), Jenny (delivery man's navigator), Mum, Lee (delivery man).

Summer

Sometimes when you've spent the whole semester teaching kids to Speak Right and Read Right, plus teaching them their important First Questions, as well as getting stuck in a Spelling Hive, when a hot day comes ya just gotta forget everything and go to the Seven for a Slurpee. Tis' summer after all.....

Spelling Hive - Dictation

New worksheet folks! For those of you that are working through The Spelling Hive Book 1 with your students, have a look at this one. Pierre and I, for a long time have been using dictation as a nice way to review and/or test students spelling. Once students are in the habit of memorising their weekly spelling words, dictation is a nice way to bring it all together. The dictation doesn't have to be long and it can be funny.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/32973849/Level1-Dictation

Give it a try and let us know how it works!

Welcome Candy!

Hi everybody,

We'd like to extend a huge warm welcome to Candy Wang to the Interactile family. Candy is our newest agent based in Taipei.

http://www.candysources.com/index.php?type=0

That's her website address. She has a great bunch of ESL materials available via her website.

Welcome to the team Candy!

Taichung Workshop 2010

Hey folks,

For any of you that are living in the Taichung area, I hope you have time on May 31st to come and see a seminar presented by Hooyi Bookstore. Interactile Learning and Anglia will be there too. Hope to see you then!

First Idioms - Prepositions of Place intermediate worksheet.

It's freebie time kids! Attached is a worksheet to be used with our First Idioms kit. This will work out best if you use it after finishing the intermediate level with your students. All the spaces need to be filled in with an idiom that uses a preposition of place (in, on, under, through).

This could also be used as a fun test. Pierre has spoken before about open book tests and this is a perfect time to try that. Tell your students that they should try to fill in all the blanks with idioms and if they get stuck, they are allowed to open their First Idiom boxes to finish them.

Good luck!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/31145657/First-Idioms-Prepositions-of-Place

Speak Right Read Right - Kit 1

The class in these pictures have just finished Level 1 of Speak Right Read Right Kit 1. So today we tried something different. I asked them to put all five vowel wheels in front of them and listen very carefully to the sound I made. They then had to find the right wheel and turn it to find the right consoant to make the full sound. They had a little bit of trouble at first but got better and better the more we tried.

The students at first had trouble differentiating the short 'a' and the short 'e' sounds but after a few attempts got pretty good at it. And then we made a game of it, to see who could find the sound the fastest as shown in these pics below.