3/2/2023 0 Comments Supermind starter![]() Super Minds 2 takes students from “What time is it?” to “Can we go horse riding tomorrow morning?” via “Has your town got a swimming pool?” and “I’d like to go to Africa by plane”. Super Minds Starter doesn’t fill the gap either, as it is designed as a purely oral/ aural approach with no phonics at all. Super Minds 1 also includes no work at all on letter formation or phonics bar a tongue twister, including in the Workbook. The topics of the units (clothes, toys, etc) and grammar (can/ can’t, there is/ there are, etc) are also fairly typical for this age range, though it did surprise me how quickly Super Minds 1 went from numbers 1 to 10, basic colours and the alphabet to “You find tigers in the jungle” in Unit 6. The stories are interesting for the kids, have a good mix of the target language and other structures, and have just the right amount of humour. More songs with actions would have been nice, though, especially in the lower level books.ĭespite the rather heavy-handed “Value” in each, the stories are quite good, especially the ones in books 1 and 2 with four characters with special powers, including talking to animals and becoming invisible. They also cover some language points that I’ve never come across good songs for, such as Simple Past and names of countries. As well as the humour that the chants lack, the songs have a good range of voices and tunes. Luckily, the actual songs are much better, with about 50% of them being ones I’d keep to use in other classes too. The chants in this series are similarly uninspired. Going back to the elements that most books of this kind have, there seems to be an idea that anything connected to the topic of the unit that has rhythm is a useful chant that is going to help students learn, whereas in fact it is just as difficult to write a chant that is catchy and motivating as it is to write a good song. – The quality of and some of the activities on the DVD ROM which is included with the Student’s Book – Lots of use of miming, such as “Do that” stages where they give instructions for their partners to perform – 3D computer animated stories and related pictures, but nicely mixed with photos and other styles of picture – The characters are only followed for one or two books, making sure they and their accompanying stories are age appropriate in a way that is not always true of such series Other things that distinguish this series from the crowd include: I’m not sure why activities like “Read and write the names” have “Think” next to them, and unfortunately these are much more common than activities which really stretch their brains in imaginative ways. Examples of activities to also develop thinking skills include mixing primary colours and matching animals to their skeletons, and the thinking skills listed on the “Maps” range from “Paying attention to visual details” in Super Minds Starter to “Decoding and sequencing” in Super Minds 3. ![]() The most notable thing in the “Map” of each book is a column marked “Thinking skills”, and it is this focus on expanding young minds which explains the name of the series. ![]() In common with most recent books, it also has stickers and a DVD ROM at the back of the book, a rather moralistic tone (with “Value” written under each story), projects/ crafts that don’t necessarily produce a lot of English, and a CLIL component (“English for School”). Instructions that have little connection to motivating students to actually learn like “Listen and look” and “Listen and point” proliferate in both the Student’s Book and Teacher’s Book, and many of the “games” are nothing of the kind. Each book in the series follows a group of characters through nine units, with a chant, song and picture story per unit. Having reviewed quite a few recent primary and pre-primary courses for MET and taught with many more, I must admit that they are all starting to blur together a bit and there are many aspects of Super Minds that might merge into that amorphous mess in my brain in a year or so. This is mainly a review of Super Minds 1 (which I had all components for) with some mention of how the series varies going down and up the levels (from Super Minds Starter, Super Minds 2, and Super Minds 3, which I only had the Student’s Books for). I think this more direct response to the materials also has its merits though… If you want to more carefully thought through and edited version, you’ll have to read the July edition of Modern English Teacher magazine. ![]()
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