Learning Chocolate

Learning Chocolate ★★★★
http://www.learningchocolate.com/

Learning Chocolate makes the comparison that learning can be as fun as eating chocolate. The website is certainly the most accessible and comprehensive I have yet encountered. In addition to the exercises focusing on language, they also touch on content. The visual, written, and listening components of literacy are addressed specifically and scaffolding is provided through the use of pictures and interactive features. The site is split into two main areas, content and links. The links portion provides leads to about forty websites that fall into three categories, general resources, website directories, and sites for teachers. The content area has about 170 lessons divided in to six categories, animals, basic, body, clothing, food, home, nature, and others. The lesson themselves are flash driven (no downloads) and are further divided into seven categories. The first is review where a diagram or picture is shown with area labeled with a word and a link to hear the word. Then there are three different match up sections that allow the user to match by sound to word association, word to picture association, and sound to picture association. There is a fill-in section that matches word to picture, where the user has to recall the word independently. Finally, there is a dictation section that matches sound to word. All sections have a timer, score, and provide correct and incorrect answers when the student is finished. A help section is available as a resource.

I really enjoyed the design of this website, although content does need to be reviewed for relevance. While the cow exercise that divides the anatomy of the cow into sections in a way a butcher might find useful, may not be correct but more importantly might not be useful to a second grader. “Mommy, that is the brisket of the cow.” Other sections were problematic in other way, for instance a croissant was labeled a roll, which may not technically be wrong, but is certainly not the best label. Sections like shoe and continents were spot on. This is a tremendous resource for ELL students and may serve to be a great introduction to units and reward for early completion of work. The site provides data for charting progress over time. The audio files are presented in a clear and well-pronounced manner.