A guide to Mingoville’s Activities
The activities in the Missions are grouped under three activity categories: Stories, Creative Lab and Educational Games. Under each mission, all activities have a certain color – green for story, orange for creative and yellow for game. As you may notice, not all missions have all types of activities – it depends on the theme of each mission. For example, the activity Transmogrifier is about using adjectives, and some missions are more suitable for this activity than others.
Activities are grouped in colours
Stories – are interactive stories, interactive scenes and language use activities Creative Lab – is experimental and creative activities Games – are educational games based on the English vocabulary of the mission NOTE: Some of the activities have extra materials available for download from our website at Mingoville.com/downloads
Stories Children require comprehensible language input to learn a new language. M ingoville contains a wide range of illustrative and interactive stories with a language level that is above the language level of the children when they start learning English with Mingoville. However, listening to and interacting with the stories will quickly give them knowledge of the primary words of the Missions. As they continue playing with the words in the different Story activities, the words will become part of their vocabulary. The children will not understand everything from the beginning but by listening, reading and interacting with the words and listening to them over and over again, they will grow familiar with the words. The stories also encourage the students to use and develop guessing strategies that help to convey messages from an early stage. Some of the stories are also found in the download section and may be used in class role games and drama activities. Letting the children invent stories and practice different dialogues in class is very effective when it comes to language acquisition. Each mission contains different story activities: Rich pictures, Illustrate the story, Give us a clue, What to say and Grammar demo.
Rich Picture
Each mission starts with a Rich Picture story. The physical setting of the mission is introduced in this activity. Within these levels, the child can select individual items by clicking on them to hear and/or read what the items are called in English, increasing their vocabulary. The activity p rogresses from level one, where fundamental/ basic nouns are introduced, to level two, where expressions connected to the current theme are presented.
Illustrate the Story One of the members of the Pinkelton family tells a short story about the Pinkeltons. The students have to retell the story afterwards using the different images from the story. Each of the 16 pages is accompanied by an illustration that supports the children’s understanding of the storyline and assists them in retelling the story. This will expand children’s awareness of the English language and let them combine pictures with text.
Give Us a Clue
One of the characters in Mingoville tells a story, but he or she stops from time to time and encourages the child to help continue the story b y selecting a correct keyword or answering the narrator’s questions. The objective is to encourage the children to develop strategies to find out what a person is talking about without fully understanding all of what is b eing said. Without the pressure of having to respond to a real person, children take the risk of describing things they do not know the exact words for.
What to Say? A conversation between two characters is heard, seen and interacted with in this activity. From time to time, the dialogue stops and the students become involved in the storytelling p rocess by choosing how characters should respond to the questions. The purpose of this activity is to present authentic language to the student. This enables the children to engage in dialogue with their classmates using similar language. Moreover, it enhances the students’ awareness of the different sentence patterns.
Grammar demo
Small graphic illustrations and text teach the children the basic elements of grammar. The children observe grammatical changes to words and usage in the English language. The d ifferent aspects shown in the demos are incorporated in other activities following the grammar demo. The activity will help creating a rudimentary grammatical awareness.
The Creative Lab In the Creative Lab, the children are encouraged to play with the words. They can color various pictures, listen to songs, sing and record karaoke, and listen to their own recorded songs. By giving the children the possibility of using an aesthetic form of expression, they may use their English in a playful, low-‐stress atmosphere.
About Me Children are interviewed for a newspaper. They are asked 6 different questions, which they can answer either by choosing predefined answers or by typing their own. The questions and answers are collected in an article that is automatically saved in “My Book”. This allows the children to make sentences themselves and experience a “proper” interview.
Sing along The children can listen to and sing songs with varying degrees of complexity related to the M ission. Each Mission has a unique song. Once the children have listened to a song, they can sing the song themselves, record it and use it to give a concert to their friends in Mingoville Virtual World. Not only does this practice the students’ vocabulary, the songs can also be used in the Virtual World.
Type Spelling Teacher Liz or Dr. Phil Good guides the students though a game of type spelling and tells them what to write. The main focus is the spelling of nouns. The nouns are illustrated to show the children what to write.
Drag & Drop Writing Teacher Liz guides the pupils through a game of Drag and Drop Writing. Children are to write different sentences by d ragging different words into the b oxes on the blackboard. The children get to practice sentence patterns using a recognizable template. As the words are pre-‐spelled, the focus is strictly on sentence construction.
Point It Out Challenge In this activity the children have to click on the things the host calls out. The activity challenges the children to see how many words they can remember and recognize. The activity will enable the teacher to evaluate h ow much their students h ave learned during the Missions. The challenge is one of the final exercises in each Mission.
Show the Time In this activity children first try to set the clock on their own. Then they will get a question where they have to tell the right time. The purpose of the activity is to let the children practice the numbers and learn the time.
Transmogrifier In this activity children have to drag different adjectives into a magic box in order to transform or describe a situation surrounding the character Magic Mingo. The purpose is to enhance the children’s grasp of concept learning and their knowledge of different adjectives by connecting the adjectives to pictures/animations.
Picture Creator Children have to make their own picture by d ragging the picture elements from the (specified) Mission on to the screen. This allows the child to play and explore the language in a fun way. The pictures can be sent to grandparents or parents afterwards. They can also serve as Christmas cards and the like.
Projects The children read about a specific topic (e.g., sports, animals or the body) and are encouraged to find more information about the topic on the Internet. This activity will dispatch the children to the Internet to let them try to find some specific information on an Internet page in English.
Games
The educational games function as a way to teach different nouns and expressions in a playful atmosphere. They encourage the children to connect the English language in action. The games contain elements of competition. They all have a scoreboard that keeps track of the children’s actions in all the games. Each game has several levels where the pace and degree of difficulty increases as each game progresses. This is very stimulating for the children who have difficulty concentrating or who are quickly bored.
Colour This In this activity, children are instructed to color various things in a variety of colors within the Rich Picture setting. This exercise gives the children experience following instructions and trains their vocabulary.
Catch It In this game, one of the Mingoville characters is placed in a setting where different items, including text and sounds, fall from above and must be caught in the trolley. The purpose of this activity is to consolidate vocabulary and concepts introduced in the Mission. The activity gradually becomes harder, with more and faster falling letters.
Memory This activity is a memory game. In this game, the cards either show text, a picture or a loudspeaker icon indicating that a sound will be played. Children have to match text with a picture, text with a sound or a picture with a sound. Through this activity, children interact with their vocabulary as it is presented in varying forms: sounds, text and p ictures. This playful combination encourages the child to learn all words.
Pacman In this game, children must eat the letters that spell the words the game asks for. Of course, this gets harder as the child has to avoid the roaming ghosts. The game lets the child spell words u nder pressure, as they make quick decisions and react instantly.