Animals

 ==The Best Sites For Learning About Weird-Looking Creatures (And For Making Your Own!)== Larry Ferlazzo Jan 06, 2010 05:32:26 GMT  Share Weird-looking critters always generate high-interest from students — English Language Learners and mainstream alike. Reading, writing, and talking about them are excellent language-development activities, and I’ve listed some good accessible sites on this list. In the second part of this post, I share some sites that — believe it or not — let students also easily create their own weird-looking animals. First designing, then describing (along with talking and listening) them also provide good language-learning opportunities. Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Learning About Weird-Looking Creatures And For Making Your Own!): //**LEARNING ABOUT THEM:**// __19 Insanely Weird Animals__ is a slideshow from LIFE Magazine. __The weirdest animals on Planet Earth__ comes from the British paper The Telegraph. MSN has some of the __World’s weirdest animals__ and __Weird Animals That You Can Travel to See__. __Weird New Animals From Antarctica’s Deep Seas__ is from National Geographic. __Nick Baker’s Weird Creatures__ is a show on the Smithsonian Channel, and you can see many clips on their site. The Web Ecoist has several good resources, including: __The 9 Strangest Animals on Earth Nine Outstanding Expanding Animals! 15 of the World’s Strangest Animals 20 Scary Animals The Weird Animal Express__ is a student-created site. __Strange, odd and beautiful creatures__ is from a Florida newspaper. //**CREATING YOUR OWN:**// With __Animal Mix-Up__ you can create a bizarre creature, email the link and post it. English Language Learners can not only use it as an opportunity to describe their creation, but the design process itself provides an excellent opportunity for vocabulary development. There are a lot of choices for creature modifications, and their accompanied with visual and text descriptions. __Build Your WIldself__ is from the New York Zoos and Aquarium. Instead of explaining it here, I’m just going to suggest you read a post from __Kevin Jarrett__ which explains it in detail. __The Switch Zoo__ is another similar site. However, you can only print-out creation, not save it online. Feedback is always welcome. If you found this post useful, you might want to consider __subscribing to this blog for free__. You might also want to explore the __400 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled__.