Tree Frog Publishing

1. Open the lesson you wish to enter by clicking on the title once. For the TOUR, you may access Lesson 1 of each language and all the geography/culture and fun pages free.

2. If you are accessing the non-English sites, under each title, heading or set of instructions, roll your mouse over the foreign language text to see the translation if you need to like this sample. You will see that after one or two lessons, you will know the icons and be able to read the lessons with "full immersion," or in other words, no translation.

3. Always begin each new lesson by familiarizing yourself with the new vocabulary. Click on the Body builder icon =>

and enter the vocabulary lesson. These are printable as well. You can print them and cut the squares to make cards! (Try to utilize them without writing the translation of the word. At your age, you learn best by simply remembering the word and picture together.)

Click on the penguin =>

icon to listen to the audio pronunciation. The penguin icon always indicates listening materials on the entire site. You will note the sound waves coming out of the penguin's megaphone when the audio is functioning.You will hear the word or phrase read once by a boy and once by a girl of your age, native speakers from each country. In the case of Spanish, you will hear a girl from Spain and a boy from Mexico who have very different accents. In the case of English, the girl is from the U.S.A. and the boy from England.

Continue the vocabulary by scrolling down as it is read, and clicking on next to go to the next page.When you finish, click on Back to the lesson.

4. Now return to the lesson by clicking on Back to the lesson. You are ready to read! You will not understand everything. Try to get the gist of the ideas. Look at the words, the context (the other words around in relation to what you do not know, the chapter topic, etc.), and any words that may look very similar to your native language (these are called cognates or friends). Try to guess at their meaning!

5. You will notice that certain words appear in bright blue font. These can be rolled over with your mouse and Voila! You will see red explanations below like this sample. These offer additional information like grammar rules or cultural notes.

These offer additional information like grammar rules or cultural notes.

6. In many cases, there are links to pictures, back to the vocabulary, to audio or video. You do not need translations because everything links back to a vocabulary picture!

Click on the photograph of the child to hear a real native speaker talking about the topic at hand. See how much you can understand.You should access these repeatedly. There are hundreds of interviews with the same group of kids filmed on location. You will get to know the kids and their culture well throughout the lessons.

7. Now try some exercises! Constructing New Meanings

is a section devoted to building on what you already have learned. These exercises are especially for kids doing this as part of a class or with a parent's help.

8. Now try some fun Flash activities! Juggling Your New Knowledge

is a section devoted fun, easy, sorting and classifying activities. This shows you just how much you have learned! If you do not get it right the first time, go back again and again. These also have a self-correcting feature.

9. After completing the games, you may wish to access a variety of other information about the cultural topic of the chapter like popular food, music, art, transportation, sports, TV, etc. You should also read the Geography Reading and the Culture Reading for each lesson. Be sure to also check out all the information housed on the complete Geography and Culture Sleuths web site, under the Navigator icon

. Also, play our fun Flash navigational games in 6 countries!

10. If you are using this web site as part of a course, your teacher may ask you to complete the Writing Activity at the end of each chapter by which you can create our own original dialogue or short descriptive paragraph. You may also want to use the picture as a means to write a short paragraph in English (or your native language) about how this scene reflects something you have learned about the culture of the country/countries. You may also want to look at the additional links and search topics under the Web Photos icon.

For more tips on using the web sites and learning a language in general, see our Website Usage Tips for Kids and Website tips for Parents and teachers http://www.languagesleuths.com/tour/parents.html

Click here to start your FREE TOUR of Lessons 1 and the entire Geography and Culture plus Fun travel sites!