In a recent posting here on the blog, Stephen Fry reminds us how much nicer it is to be in a position to give than to need to ask for something...
Well, May has already been a month of some fairly liberal "giving" (out of free ELT materials) here on English Raven - with a free Phonics Starter Kit, the whole catalogue of my City of CleverKey materials, some supplementary YLE test kit materials, and - most recently - my Places in the Community flashcards alongside some practical ideas on how to use them in the classroom.
I've received so many grateful comments and DMs on Twitter for these free downloads, and I have to admit that Mr. Fry is completely correct - it IS a buzz to be able to give something!
So why stop there?
I thought I would go out with a bit of a bang for the month of May. I'm going to throw my entire phonics and Sentence Navigator catalogues out into the Internet ether, for any teachers out there to pick up and hopefully pull some gems from.
First up - Phonics Starter
This download is a combined file containing all three of my Phonics Starter kits (quick teacher's guides for each of the three kits - 15 lessons - are located at the end of the file):
Next up - Phonics Builder
There were originally six of these kits, designed to follow up from Phonics Starter, with more overt work with consonants and short vowel sounds. I've combined them into three separate downloads with two kits and ten phonics lessons in each (again with teacher's guides located at the end of the downloads):
Download Phonics Builder A 1-2
Download Phonics Builder B 3-4
Download Phonics Builder C 5-6
And the Grand Finale - Sentence Navigator Kits
These were some of the first organised workbooks I ever made - in my second year of full-time teaching to young learners and teenagers if I recall correctly. They were made at a time when my learners were being called on to develop more writing and grammar skills, and I wanted to make the most of an "experiment and discover" approach. There is a kits menu with more information here, and an overview and demonstration of some of the key activity types here. I was still something of a novice when it came to formatting and layout, as well as making my own web pages to distribute the materials (hey, we're going back a decade or so here!), so I hope you can be forgiving.
A couple of years later I organized all the lessons into complete kits, and here are all four levels of "Sentence Navigator" for you to download!
I never did get around to making teacher's guides for the Sentence Navigator books, but teachers always appeared to get by and be able to use the books without really needing them. I hope that is still the case.
The Sentence Navigator books have been surprisingly versatile, with teachers I've worked with using them in private academies, public school settings (primary/elementary and junior high school), with a variety of age groups. I was genuinely surprised when I got a phone call from Australia's public copyright agency to inform me that some primary schools in Australia had adopted sections from Sentence Navigator to use in their core language arts curriculum (and even happier when it turned out a nice fat cheque was headed my way!).
Anyway, there's a good 300+ pages of learning material here on this page for you to download and use with your classes, whether it be for phonics activities or sentence "navigation". Please do remember that you have my permission to download, print and use any or all of these materials for your own classes, but under no circumstances are they to be on-sold or uploaded to other sites without my express permission. Please.
I hope you'll enjoy these museum pieces from the Raven's Nest, and I hope they are still as relevant and useful for today's classrooms as everyone keeps telling me they are!
Cheers,
- Jason
