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 Color Vowel® teaching resources |
PDF to download | Video for how to use |
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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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| Vocabulary words available in Color It Out | |
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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 | |
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| Blue Canoe Collaborative Dictation Activity | |
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| Student Instructions for downloading Blue Canoe | |
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| How to use the Blue Canoe Teacher’s Dashboard (Klipfolio) | |
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| Panel: Learn how teachers are using Blue Canoe in the classroom | |
Blue Canoe is built on the world-renowned Color Vowel Approach, a 20-year-old methodology based on brain science for language learning. Get to know Color Vowel.
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.
How are you teaching your students to practice? Are they practicing correctly? That sounds odd, don’t they practice the way you showed them? Have you given them an explicit routine for practicing?
Watch to find out Karen Taylor’s 3-part routine for creating a habit of successful practice to learn the patterns of English:
Karen reveals in this class that she uses her hand to record the recordings in Blue Canoe. Your students should use their hand along with her.
Karen Taylor shares useful tips and innovations recently posted by members of My Color Vowel® Community on Facebook. As Karen says in this video, it doesn’t need to be expensive to teach with Color Vowel, we can be “scrappy and serviceable.”
Teaching activities and tools shared in this video:
To join the vibrant and fun My Color Vowel Community Facebook group of EL teachers, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/colorvowelcommunity to request to join.
To ensure everyone has at least a basic understanding of Color Vowel, you must be Color Vowel-certified or own the Color Vowel book (available at https://colorvowel.com/shop/).
The Color Vowel Shop is also where you can buy the Color Vowel image cards.
How effective is modeling when we train English pronunciation?
How often are we modeling in ways that are ineffective?
We know modeling using listen-and-repeat is ineffective. Watch Karen Taylor share how she models for non-native English speakers to help them say English sounds.
Chanting is a great technique for teaching the rhythm of English. No, we aren’t suggesting that you move to a remote monastery to teach English. 🙂
The Color Vowel® Approach engages the part of your brain that processes music (as well as color, images and movement). Creating a rhythm from everyday phrases is easy and highly effective for learners to hear the rhythm of English.
Where do you begin with a student when you’re introducing them to Color Vowel®? Do you use the Color Vowel chart? Do you start with practical vocabulary?
Watch Karen Taylor for her suggestions about introducing Color Vowel to students who are new to the concept.
Say the word ‘dictation,’ and you may recall that spelling-focused activity of childhood. Turned on its end, though, collaborative dictation draws learners together to reconstruct what they heard, and opportunities for pronunciation awareness and practice abound.
Watch Karen Taylor for how to use this powerful activity and how Blue Canoe is there to support.
Here are the resources that Karen mentions in this session.
Are you missing the magic of choral repetition while teaching online? Mirroring is an effective alternative that will get your students doing pronunciation through rich practice.
Watch Karen for an introduction to mirroring and ways to include it in your online classroom.
Color Vowel easily addresses the stressed vowels, but there are more unstressed vowels that are used in English to communicate.
Watch Karen talked about unstressed vowels and her answer to the question “To schwa or not to schwa?”
Watch Laura McIndoo demonstrate how to install the Blue Canoe Dictionary browser extension. Then, she’ll put it into action showing you why it’s exciting for your students.
Flooding is the repetition of a sound multiple times in a row to help retrain our brain to accurately hear it. We use flooding in a number of activities in Blue Canoe® to help improve pronunciation.
Watch Karen Taylor talk about ways to quickly create flooding activities with your students. Get them involved!
Do the words ‘man’ and ‘map’ feature different vowel sounds? Do ‘pin’ and ‘pen’ sound the same to you? What’s the difference between the vowel in ‘goat’ and the vowel in ‘goal’?
Watch Karen Taylor for an exploration of consonants that control the vowels that precede them.
R and L are very common sounds in English. They are also two of the trickiest sounds to make for many non-native English speakers. Those sounds don’t exist in many languages.
Watch Karen Taylor explore what R and L have in common, how they’re different, and how Blue Canoe® provides corrective feedback on each of these interesting sounds.
Resources used in this video:
Having ready-to-use pronunciation examples on hand can really boost our ability to answer students’ questions efficiently.
In this Blue Canoe Teacher’s Clinic, Karen shows you a few of her favorite examples for addressing word and focus stress, vowel quality, invisible sounds, and spelling confusion. It will inspire your own examples!
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.
There are many different accents in English pronunciation depending on where you from. Each accent has its own story which we can recognize through their action when they are speaking and the movement of their lips. Based on the accent that was spoken, it will lead the word to a different Color Vowels.
Watch this Blue Canoe Clinic to see Karen, her special guest, master linguist Dr. Robin Barr, and teachers discuss this and practice to pronounce each word in different accent using different Color Vowels.
Which is more important in spoken English, stress or Color? There are many English words that sound similar to taboo words. If you mispronounce these words, it can become an uncomfortable conversation. How can we avoid this from happening?
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 avoid these situations.
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.
What is a “word markup,” you ask? Learn how the mark-up of a word helps you figure out how to say it. What you’ll learn:
Watch this Blue Canoe class with Karen Taylor to learn how Color Vowel Yoga can help overcome challenges with the vowel sounds of English. It’s especially good for those who have hit a wall in their English pronunciation. And those who Blue Canoe keeps giving corrective feedback on vowels.
The Color Vowel Chart changes the way we experience language.
“A word is no longer a bunch of letters that string together sounds. Rather it is a sound event that has a feeling that comes from a vowel in the center of the stress.”
That’s the Color.
– Karen Taylor, award-winning edtech visionary
Karen uses a technique called “What Color do you hear?” to help create that experience.
Watch this Blue Canoe class with Karen Taylor and her special guest Dr. Robin Barr showing you tips on how to practice using the “What Color do you hear” technique.
Go to What Color Do You Hear? Facebook Group for more resources to practice and participate in “What Color Do You Hear?” activity.
Learning should be fun, and we had a lot of fun in Thursday’s Blue Canoe class. Master linguist Laura McIndoo walked the group through how to play Colorgories – brainstorming words in a Color Vowel to perform flooding. Then, Laura shared a website she uses to make Color Vowel crosswords. What? So much fun. Click on them from the Blue Canoe Facebook page to play yourself.
Watch this Blue Canoe class with Karen and her special guest Laura McIndoo showing you games you can use to help with English pronunciation.
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.
In this video:
