I recently discovered a cartoon on youtube for learning English. It is called "Gogo's Adventure with English". I have linked below episode 1 which is about 5 minutes long.

It is really too easy for Nong Grace but it did giver her the satisfaction of understanding everything in a cartoon. It is really good for her to learn grammar and also to pick up new words. They have most episodes on youtube which you can download. I want to try and buy the real thing as it will be great for my Kindergarten 2 classes. Though, I think too easy for my Kindergarten 3 classes as the English cartoon they are watching at the moment is harder. (I will tell you details on that one later.)

I have now discovered the books for this series at DK Book House. They are called "Gogo Loves English" and are published by Longman. You can probably buy at Chula Books as well. I have now discovered that these are aimed at Primary 1 - 6. Here I was thinking I would show them to my Kindergarten 2 kids. Maybe even Kindergarten 1 in the second term. I won't be using the books as such in the class but they will be useful as teaching aids. As mentioned before, I mainly teach large classes with about 120 students at a time.

Nong Grace saw these books for the first time today. Although the vocab is quite easy, I didn't think she would get too much out of it as they don't teach kindergarten to read at our school beyond "hat, rat, cat, bat" etc. However, she bowled me over by reading aloud the conversations in the books and also many of the vocabulary lists. I didn't realize she could do that already. I think she must have picked up a lot of English reading from the computer games she plays a lot. I have mentioned a couple of these already but will tell you her other favourites later. I guess she also picks up the words from our reading sessions as well. I used to point to the different people in pictures when I read the stories. But, these days I more often point to the words as I read and then pause to see if she can read key words. I wasn't really planning on teaching her to read as I wanted to leave something for the scohol to do. But it looks like it is too late for that now. She reads with a better voice than many of my Primary 6 students.

UPDATE: Two years later and I want to say how much my Kindergarten 3 students enjoyed using the Gogo books even though they were aimed at Primary 1. They also watched all of the cartoons for Primary 1-3. They would have watched more but we ran out of time. I also showed Kindergarten 2 some of the Gogo cartoons and they enjoyed it too. They will be using the books next year. Nong Grace still watches the cartoons every now and then but these days she is watching more sophisticated cartoons.