Hi this is Russell Stannard from Teachertrainingvideos.com.
A couple of weeks ago I did a presentation on readers and reading and as part of that
black cat made some content available to me for free which I was able to share with all the
people that came to the webinar and I'm gonna give access to all the people that follow me on teacher
training videos access to the same content and it includes a brilliant website of loads
of videos and free audio files and lesson plans all around stories but also access to three free
readers with the audio files and the teachers notes etc so watch this video and you'll get
access to loads of free material that you could really make use of in the class or encourage
your students to make use of particularly the content on the website is completely
free even without logging in for the second part you will need the code which i do show you in
the video to access the content for free but you get access to three readers for free so watch the
video i think you're gonna find it really useful lots of free content for english language teachers
and thank you very much as always if you like the video please like it please share the video
with other teachers please comment on it and of course come and subscribe to my YouTube channel
don't forget to click on the bell to follow me let's get started so part one of the free
content that's available from black cat is all of this kind of material that you can use either
alongside the book if you're reading the book but you could use in isolation and remember many of
the stories that are focused on here are some of those stories you can actually access on YouTube
etc so you'd have to kind of look how you want to link it together but you could just use this
material in isolation as well and let me just give you a few examples so for example if we click here
on sustainable development and we come down here you can see we've got video we've got lesson plans
and we've got the audio files and the activities so here we've got the listening material which is
taking an extract from Oliver twist and if we click here it tells us the level as well
entered Mr Sowerberry's shop good evening said Mr Bumble so that is the audio file that
you've got access to but if you click back you'll also see along with that
are some worksheets with some activities so this is the sort of thing that you could do as a way of
simply as a listening activity in isolation or as a way of encouraging students to read
the book Oliver twist or link it to material about Oliver twist that's available on YouTube
now I was a big fan when I used to teach english and use readers in the class
uh I was a very big fan of contextualizing the books that I would read and kind of building up
the story before I even got the students to read them so for me this material is really
interesting let's look at some other examples so notice in that free section you've got
video content lesson plans and then all the listening audio material and the worksheets
and notice the number of stories so we've got here Gulliver's travels Oliver toys chain air etc
so let's click on another section listen to my story and again we've got loads of material here
that we can access again we've got some audio material and we've got the actual activities
to go alongside it let's just have a quick look here so let's first of all see the activities
if we click here we've got a worksheet again that's been provided to us that obviously we can
print out and use with our students and we've also got access to the audio file which is obviously an
extract from the book and this is quite low level so let's just have a quick look at that
Alibaba was a woodcutter he was from Persia in the middle east so again this material could be used
either in isolation simply as an introduction into the book and of that particular section of
the story or as I said it could be a springboard to getting the students to actually read that book
or to perhaps get additional material on that book and there are things that you can find on YouTube
around many of these kind of very well-known stories what these kind of videos do is
set up the context of the book or kind of delve in slightly to the story or a theme within the story
so if we were to click on any of these you'll see that there's kind of video introductions and
normally even the most successful people have everyday problems I want to pass my exam it's so
difficult I know let's go to page 54. I'm sure jk Rowling can help me okay so that could be again uh
interesting material to work with either something else I used to do a lot of when I was teaching was
introduce the author of the book before we even got into actually looking at the book
and again these days that's much more possible to do because of the amount of content that you can
find on YouTube for example about Jake jk Rowling as an as an example so um yeah i would uh you
know really suggest that you take a look at all this free material because there is a lot of it
and if you look here you've got all these different sections and if we in fact dive into
any of them let's for example look at crime fiction you'll see that we've got different
material that we can access okay including video lesson plans and these audio files
again we could be thinking is this going to be part of a lesson or is it going to be part partly
homework or is it going to be a combination so you introduce the theme of a story perhaps into
the lesson by using the video but actually get the students to listen at home remember they can also
access this content now as part of a presentation that I gave the other day about readers and
reading black cat allowed me to share a code that would give access to three readers and those are
the names of the three readers for a month and what you need to do is sign in so add your email
address and obviously think of a password now if you haven't got an account you will have to
create an account first I'm presuming most of you won't have an account so you will need to register
once you've done that just simply remember this code here you might even want to copy it okay so
once you are registered log in and then what you want to do is add in your code here and then click
on start your trial and you're going to get some free material and I've already done it here and
you can see that I've got the three books and so let's have a look at what we get so let's start
by clicking on go to digital book and basically it's like a pdf version really of the book book
okay so you can click and read and if you come down to the bottom here if I remember right if you
click you can actually um just literally just jump straight to the chapter that you want to order the
page that you want to and it starts actually with an introduction to the author we can click through
the pages here as well and notice that if you roll over there are actually activities for you to do
as well or for the students to do obviously and then the book starts if we click here um
we again we've got some activities I think that must be chapter one yet so that's obviously
the first part of the story so um yeah the story starts here and then we've got some questions okay
that you can answer and then ah sorry sorry sorry that's the background so that's the background to
of Sherlock Holmes and dr Watson and then the book starts here okay you've got the book and notice
also that you have got the audio at the bottom so let me just click so you can see that oh your
assistant answer that can do the work for you said my wife you look I love this the fact that you
you can listen and read at the same time and this is something that I do all the time in polish
though I have to admit my progress is incredibly slow but it did help me enormously in French I
did it a lot in French I used to buy cassettes in those days this would be much better so opening up
the book and accessing the audio files remember if you click down here I think it opens up and
allows you to jump through the chapters it's a great idea I'm just going to close that down
and point out if we just come back to the actual main content you can also go to the digital book
and you've also got teachers downloads so that's some great material and again think about the key
thing about working with readers or encouraging reading is that link between what you might set
for the students to do as homework short amounts to read and what you might get the students to do
in the classroom maybe discussing the book discussing the characters discussing the story etc
and you've also got some really useful teachers downloads if we click on that
then that is going to kind of open up a pdf file so I'm just going to click on that one second
and click on here and this is what you get okay so again this could be quite useful okay
if you want to check the student's work or you want the students to check their work
and apart from that if we just close down and come back
you do have the option of getting the audio book as well
and you can click on listen here I think you've got both think notes this is the correct way yeah
and then you can jump straight to the particular chapter so obviously here
chapter one you're getting the audio without the reading could be really interesting if you were
thinking perhaps about how you might set up the context of a chapter in the class as a listening
activity but then encourage encourages students to go and actually read it afterwards or even
maybe just the first part of the chapter as an incentive to then carry on read the book at home
these types of activities could be really interesting to do with your students
okay hope that material was useful to you please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com there's
loads of other free videos on different technologies that you can use as well as
free materials there's often a lot of links to some really interesting stuff on the opening
page that's kind of focused towards teachers of languages and there's a kind of language section
and that also suggests lots of free material that you might want to make use of if you want
to follow my work the best thing to do is to sign up to the newsletter that way you get updated with
all the latest videos and the blogs the webinars and the online courses I run and of course you
can also follow me on my YouTube channel if you did want me to do a presentation for your
organization or some training you can contact me from the website and thank you very much
you