Thought I’d highlight two great treats for Advent from two inspirational people.

Firstly, Mandy Barrow of the world famous Woodlands Junior School in Kent has produced an online World Advent calendar with details of Christmas around the world.  Each day you can open a new door and find out about Christmas traditions from other countries, and find the answers to questions like

How does red-suited Santa survive in the heat of a Brazilian summer?
In what country is Pavlova a popular Christmas dessert?

At Whitehouse Common, we’re going to use it to increase our ICU each day, and hopefully discover some things that we didn’t know before!

The second Advent treat is from Mark Pentleton at Radio Lingua Network who has made a Festive Phrase advent calendar. Behind each door is a short enhanced podcast  teaching a festive phrase and also giving information about the language, speakers and where it is spoken.  Can’t wait to find out if he’s doing Icelandic!  Another great opportunity to increase the breadth of experience of our pupils in terms of language, knowledge about the world and understanding of others.

Just (re)discovered ZooBurst thanks to Carolyn Jones and her message on the Yahoo MFL resources group giving the LinkBunchURL from TeachMeet Sheffield. It’s something about which I’ve heard before.  And I’ll be investigating further.

ZooBurst is a digital storytelling tool that lets anyone easily create his or her own 3D pop-up books.

ZooBurst allows you to write your own stories and animate them as pop up books.  As the pages turn, the characters pop up, and can be made to speak.

As with Storybird, you can search an online gallery of other people’s stories.

Having had a little look, I came across these stories Celebrando el Bicentenario en Chile.