Making Waves An English Learning Environment
http://waves.galim.org.il/cgi-bin/gallery/my_waves.pl

Making Waves is designed for students learning English as a Second Language who are in grades 4 to 8.  Although the site offers a paid registration feature, there are enough free resources here to help ESL teachers and their students.

The major areas are the content based learning modules – The Fairy Tale Adventures and High Tech Adventures.  The Fairy Tale Adventures module offers the following fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Aladdin and Jack and the Beanstalk.  Each story is printed out and can be listened to online.  There are 3 levels for each story accompanied with different writing activities. The Lesson Plan Center also supplements each story with teacher lesson plan submissions and ideas on how to teach the stories.

A unique feature of the Making Waves website is the Surf the Web Site Catalogue.  This is a search engine of hand picked sites geared to English learners and their teachers.  Categories include sports, holidays, science and nature, arts and crafts, entertainment.

The paid registration features enable teachers to keep track of their classes and of individual students.  Any work saved by a student is accessible by the teacher.  The teacher can also give personal feedback to each student.  Registration also enables students to complete assignments and automatically save their results.  They also have the option of checking their work, read their teacher’s feedback, collect and store pictures and links, build a picture dictionary and collect information for their own scrapbook. 

Other benefits of paid registration include a mail box area allowing students and teachers to send e-mail to other registered students and teachers, a class forum where students can post and read messages and community forums where students can post and read messages from other registered Making Waves classes.

Although registration offers a number of features, there is enough free material on this website to add to an ESL teacher’s resources.

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