Just a quick one! Twinkl ESL are currently offering free access to users in South America in response to school closures. Miranda’s doing a great job at Twinkl and offering loads of awesome resources, many of which can be adapted for (or are even best suited to) online learning.
I found Twinkl really useful during online learning. I made various guided reading sequences on Seesaw using their resources and my learners responded well to these. I’ve since found other Twinkl resources useful for EAL classes with my Year 4 students (fronted adverbials for the win!).
Here are the access codes:
Colombia: educarjuntosCO
Mexico: educarjuntosMX
Peru: educarjuntosPE
Brazil: educarjuntosBR
Argentina: educarjuntosAR
For other locations just get in touch with Miranda via the Facebook group or via Twitter @Mirandacrowhur1
Hope you find it useful!
Here’s a recent post from Miranda at Twinkl on ELT Planning.
Categories: General, teacher development
ELT Planning 
My experience of Twinkl material is that the quality is very uneven. I would only recommend very cautious use of it (especially for kids learning English as an additional language).
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Yeah, fair point.
I felt that when I first used Twinkl say a decade ago. It was a work in progress back then and I think it put me off. I revisited it fairly recently as both BC and my int school have accounts. I feel like it’s tightened up.
It’s not perfect – Miranda at Twinkl ESL asked for fb openly on Twitter and me and a colleague had a really positive focus group with her. We discussed the need to improve reading texts and go behind comprehension Qs, more CLIL focus with the ESL resources and more of translation among other things.
Regarding the core resources for int schools and those related to NC, there are some good materials for sure. Some of the presentation resources are useful – they don’t always suit the target ages but they are a crutch for teachers. Colleagues are positive about the phonics resources for lower primary, which I’ve heard complement Read Write Inc/Letters and Sounds, but I can’t personally speak from experience there.
Overall, I’ve seen a lot of improvement with Twinkl. Cautious use – yeah maybe, although there are alternatives such as EAL Hub (reviewed recently) that are far less pedagogically sound.
Would I promote Twinkl if I were paid to or offered free access etc? I think I would, and that’s my marker.
Which resource sites would you confidently promote off your own back? You know your stuff tech-wise so I’d be keen to find out 🙂
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It’s the lower primary phonics stuff that I was looking at / had been asked to use for home schooling. My first beef was that a lot of stuff required huge amounts of printing (for very little return). But, as I used more, it became clear that proper editing was required: checking that exercises worked as they should, for example. What I saw was presumably intended for L1 kids, and this means that some of the vocabulary was not appropriate for L2/3 learners. No point using words to illustrate phonic patterns if the items are unknown! Having said that, I did explore (free) alternatives, and I can’t say that I found anywhere more reliable. Quite the opposite – most of the free stuff is worth precisely what you pay for it, or less. In the end, I found myself making up quite a lot of my own material.
Are there any resource sites that I would promote? Yes, there are some, but always with caveats, so I’d rather not go into that now as it would be a TLDR!
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Interesting point re: unknown items. Had phonics training today and trainer (our year 1 teacher) mentioned just that. We have lots of EAL learners and trainer said how the phonics input is as much a vocab building session (for all learners) as it is anything else. I’m intrigued to see how that plays out with contexts etc so may well pop down to KS1 to observe.
Re: editing, yes. And the usual problem – pdf doesn’t make that easy.
I wonder what products I would actually promote with integrity if someone paid me to. I have a soft spot for Wordwall but at end of the day it’s mostly just games (with some value of course!). Onestopenglish I promote as have written for them and value it as user, although I’ve looked through the CLIL resources recently and felt a disconnect with my practice. Sites like that are so broad though, lots on offer. Anyhow, just musing. I’d love to read your TLDR one day!
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