Wondering how to use Blue Canoe in your classroom? The resources below are videos and documents to give you tools to support your use of Blue Canoe with your learners. It’s a lot of information. Take it piece-by-piece to incorporate into your teaching.
Please see our frequently asked questions page for more information. Send us questions and ideas to partners@bluecanoelearning.com. Tell us how you’re using Blue Canoe so we can share with other ESL teachers.
Blue Canoe® and the Color Vowel® materials |
PDF Download | Video for how to use PDF |
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| Ideas for adding Blue Canoe to your classroom |  |
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| Color Vowel Chart 5th Edition (outline) | |
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| Color Vowel Organizer | |
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| Lessons in Blue Canoe | |
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| Chant: Sorry I can’t go to class today | |
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| Blue Canoe & YOU: introductory learner video | |
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| YouTube channel with short videos for students | |
Get Color Vowel certified or take other Color Vowel professional development for your level and situation. For a complete list of courses and sessions go to the Color Vowel page for teachers.
Every Thursday at 7 p.m. U.S. Pacific time we gather as teachers to discuss a topic led by Karen Taylor, co-author of the Color Vowel Approach and head of education at Blue Canoe. Catch up on past sessions below.
What do you do in your classes to prevent from doing all of the talking?
In this Blue Canoe Teacher’s Clinic, Karen shows you some powerful pronunciation activities to help your students discover the content you’re teaching. And the group discusses how to adapt ideas for teaching online.
In this Blue Canoe Teacher’s Clinic, Karen shows you how to use Blue Canoe in a Zoom meeting. As we settle into online learning, here are ways to weave Blue Canoe into your teaching moments. For example, Blue Canoe Lessons creates a common sentence you can use to teach and allow them to practice in front of you for instruction.
Pro tip: you can prep for class and sessions using the Lessons in Blue Canoe sheet that lists all of the sentences in Blue Canoe.
Chants are a form of music. So is spoken English given the rhythm of it.
In this Blue Canoe Teacher’s Clinic, Karen shows you how to use chants to understand the movement of the jaw and the rhythm in each sentence. It’s easy to construct your own chant. Watch how.
Pro tip: use the sentences in Lessons in Blue Canoe to create chants that tie back to their Blue Canoe practice time.
Do any of your learners speak quickly? There are many reasons people speak quickly: nervous, high expectations, or they’re a fast-moving person in general. Now, are they speaking quickly, or are they using long thought groups?
Watch this week’s Blue Canoe Teacher’s Clinic for the discussion and tips for how to help your learners be better understood.
Getting the correct stress placement makes all of the difference in being understood. Color is also important, though there are many times when a word can be understood using more than one Color.
Watch the discussion on the importance of stress and Color.
Have you tried having your students put their hands on either side of their neck? Why? Feel the vowel. You can feel the flex of the neck muscle when saying moving vowels, like GREEN TEA, GRAY DAY, ROSE BOAT, and others.
Watch this Blue Canoe Clinic to see Karen and her special guest, master linguist Dr. Robin Barr, discuss this and other ideas to help learners say moving vowels.
“Woulda, coulda, shoulda” Modals are challenging to teach. Yet, they are some of our most frequently used words.
In this video Karen explains allophones and how to teach them:
There are a lot of ways to introduce Color Vowel. You’ll learn:
When a student comes to you with a question, sometimes the best approach is to answer that question and wait to hear whether they probe deeper.
Learn from a classroom video taught by Laura McIndoo, a Color Vowel® master teacher how to:
In this video:
In this video:
On the third Thursday of every month we host a Blue Canoe class for users of the app and those who want to learn using the Color Vowel Approach. Teachers join these sessions to watch how Karen teaches learners, and to jump in with their own tips.
Where do you put the stress in long words (many syllables)? 🙂
Watch this Blue Canoe class with Karen and her special guests Laura McIndoo and Dr. Robin Barr discussing and practicing words that have secondary stress and unstressed syllables.
AUBURN, ORANGE, and OLIVE are sound very similar. There is a reason they are in the same corner of the Color Vowel® Chart.
Karen demonstrates one of the core activities you can use could help students who are new to Color Vowel: “WHAT COLOR IS YOUR NAME?”
Knowing the difference between how to pronounce a name in a native language and in English can help students to locate stress and learn Color Vowel in a really personal way. It includes a video of Karen creating a teaching moment and the learner excelling with the concept.
In this session, Karen talked about the importance of pronunciation in a conversation, especially over the phone. You will lose the connection in your conversation when you don’t pronounce the word correctly, which will make an entire phrase become more like a single word.
Watch how chanting can help you practice identifying the stressed.
Color It Out creator Laura Mclndoo joined to share the many ways you can play Color It Out in the classroom. Students can improve their pronunciation by working in groups and having fun in a shared experience.
BONUS: Great question from one attendee about turquoise being a PURPLE SHIRT word – not TURQUOISE TOY.
Looking for a great way to end class on a high note? Sort It Out is easy with just a whiteboard and sticky notes, or a blank Powerpoint page. Students sort words by Color Vowel, then use flooding to correct themselves.
BONUS: Karen answers how to teach the difficult R-controlled sound.
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