It’s so beautiful on the country side and it’s so healthy for the kids to get a lot of fresh air. It’s time to get out of the city and into the Nature. This week, we release two new activities in Mingoville Virtual World. The first activity is a new Nature map where the kids learn English while playing with Esmeralda and exploring the Nature. The other English activity is a new educational game that takes the kids fishing for English words. It’s all about fun English learning.

Explore Nature and Learn the English Words
On Mingoville’s new map Nature, the kids can now enjoy the fresh air out in the nature together with Esmeralda. Esmeralda is Bob and Candy’s aunt in Mingoville. Esmeralda will take the kids on a tour around Nature. The activity is developed to let the kids practice the vocabulary learned in Mission 4 in Mingoville School; Nature and Season.

Esmeralda will ask the students to go and find different words that relate to Nature and Seasons – that could be fire camp, flowers, clouds, skies, trees, etc. If the students are good, they will get a reward for their effort. It’s kind of a treasure hunt as they have to find their reward in the end by guessing the hint from Esmeralda.

The English exercise is based on both listening to the word as well as recognizing the words in order to be able to find them. We recommend that the students work with the English exercises of Mission 4 in Mingoville School prior to exploring Nature in Mingoville Virtual World.

Go Fishing and Do Some Spelling

In Nature, the kids can also learn English going on a fishing trip. When fishing on the Mingo Lake, the students have to catch the fish in the water with their fishing rod. For every fish they catch, they earn points. However, some fish have a letter in the stomach. If the kids can spell the word illustrated in the upper left corner by catching the fish with the right letter, they get bonus points. If they catch other things like boots, they lose points.

The game is on time and the student has to reach the target – it means, they have to reach the goal set within the time frame which is typically between 60-120 seconds.

The Fishing game has several levels. In the first level, the kid can get around with “just” catching fish to reach the target. However in level two or level three, they cannot reach the target without catching in the bonus – they need to spell the word to go to the next level. The higher the level, the tougher it gets.

All words to be spelled are from Mission 4 in Mingoville School; Nature and Seasons. If the kids cannot spell the words, we recommend they complete activity 1-8 in Mission 4.

We hope you have a lot of fun – if there is something you don’t understand or have suggestion on things we need to do, feel free to comment

We invite all flamingos to participate in the wild race to the top of all score lists in Mingoville’s new virtual world for kids.

To celebrate the opening of our new virtual world, we give out 50 SuperLearnerships to the best English performing kids. This means that the kids that are on the top 10 ‘World’, ‘All Time’ score list in any of the games in Mingoville by July 12th, 2009 12:00 a.m. CET time win a 3-month SuperLearnership.

Who’s a SuperLearner? That’s a kid dedicated to becoming an English savvy flamingo while having a lot of fun. As a SuperLearner you can build the coolest flamingo in Mingoville, buy clothes and other things made available for the SuperLearner flamingos as they are keen on learning English. SuperLearners also get to try out all new areas before we introduce them to everybody else. Win a SuperLearnership and get exclusive access to the red carpet every time.

The rules of the Mingoville SuperLearner Championship are simple:

By playing one of the educational games in Mingoville, the kids will get points for their performance. To get on the top 10 ‘World’ ‘All time’ high score list you will have to have one of the 10 highest scores of the game. It means that you need to beat everyone else in the world to become a SuperLearner.

In the Boat Race, in order to be amongst the top 10 you need to race all the laps and collect relevant English words by recognizing the images.

The Letter Game is all about spelling as many words as possible. The more difficult the word is the higher score you will get if spelled correctly.

The Concert Game is different from the other games because it requires the kids to record one of the 10 songs found in Mingoville School. After recording a song the kid selects the final version and plays it in front of his or her friends. To get on the top 10 ‘World’ ‘All time’ list, the kid has to make a lot of funky moves while the songs plays. During performance the kid may or may not receive a lot of applause from the audience depending how well he or she performs. The best moves and the ‘loudest’ applause will surely get the artist on top of the list.

The lucky winners will be announced July 13th – break a leg and have fun

June Rosendahl

Mingoville Team

Hello Mingovillers,

We have written a lot about the launch of Mingoville Virtual World over the past months, and about all the games where kids can immerse themselves into the English language by playing lots of fun, educational games. Now, Mingoville World is LIVE for everybody. Sign up and try for yourself.

Now out of beta, Mingoville Virtual World offers every child, teen, ESL student a chance to improve their English in a fun and engaging way all for free. Learning English doesn’t only take place inside the classroom any longer. It takes place everywhere on the Internet, and especially in social media.

Kids share, develop, and create their lives and relationships in social media. At Mingoville, we go a step further with our new virtual world based on Massively Multiplayer Online Games, turning social networking and gaming for kids into social learning for kids. As you may know, the number of children in virtual worlds will grow tremendously over the next years.

Creating a virtual world that combines teaching English for kids with games and socialization is the best way to obtain an immersive yet effective learning environment on a platform that is so familiar to the kids already. Adding a virtual world to our interactive English program also gives us the opportunity to provide better ESL education for everybody, regardless of their limited access to education and learning resources in their home country. Although it requires a broadband connection and a PC, everything is stored online so the children can login from anywhere 24/7. This is social learning when it’s best.

We release new features every day and develop new games and activities constantly to keep the kids interested. The more they play and learn English, the bigger the reward of coins and feathers to play with. It offers them an incentive to learn.

Over the next weeks, we will go more into depth with the different games and their educational elements in order to give you parents, teachers and interested people an idea of how we see education for the 21st century. Sign up freely to RSS feed to be notified.

Stephan Stephensen

We have recently received an email from one of the newly-launched Learning Centres in Santa Marta, Colombia.

We were so happy to find out from the administration who included the Mingoville program in their curriculum as part of the educational process at the Centre.

Here are some photos of the kids learning English with Mingoville.

The kids are playing “Catch it” game where they need to catch English words that fall down.

Children are playing the memory game in Mingoville

Yes, I am the winner!

“I am learning in the Mingoville classroom in the Mission called ‘Numbers and Letters’, Activity 1″.

This is how you should catch it

If you want your kids to learn English with Mingoville go ahead and create your own account and happy learning!

Stephan, CEO

Hello Mingovillers,

A couple of weeks ago, we found a blog on the Internet that caught our attention. We got inspired by this story and decided to write a post on our blog.

Here it goes.

The blogger’s name is Debbie. Debbie lives in Japan where she works as English teacher. She is married and has two lovely sons: Issei and Koji.

Debbie has a blog where she shares with her students and friends some interesting and personal things about her life and family.

We found her blog very interesting to pass it around internally. Not only she writes in a interesting style but also because her family has this tradition called “Flamingo Friday”.

As Debbie says, they started the tradition a couple of months ago and every week they pick up pictures of flamingos from their house and Google Images. They simply love flamingos!

Debbie’s sons both speak English well. However, Debbie thinks that her boys, especially the older one, should take advantage of some online programs (like Mingoville) to improve reading, spelling and writing skills. Not to mention that Mingoville is all about flamingos that speak only English.

This is what Debbie wrote on her blog about Mingoville:

“a very good friend of mine (Hi Tomoko!!), who knows that I am all over anything flamingo…told me about a site on the Internet for kids who are learning English. It is called [Mingoville]. Mingoville is a city where flamingos live and speak only English. (I’m liking this already!) There is an interactive dictionary with 32 different languages…and they also have spelling, speaking, listening and reading activities. And the best part…..IT’S FREE!!! She told me about it, not only because of the particular theme this site has, but because it is a pretty good site for Issei to work on his own reading, spelling and writing skills. Though the young man can communicate verbally in English…..he is just like most other kids his age here in Japan when it comes to the other aspects of communication.”

By the way, Halloween is coming soon. Inspired by Debbie’s blog we’ve found some pretty flamingo costumes for almost the whole family. Pick and choose …

In the end, we just want to add that we are happy that by using Mingoville our users can combine ‘traditions’ with fun learning. If you want to read more about Debbie’s Flamingo Fridays go here

Vladimir Chen

Hello all,

We are very proud to announce our partnership with a global non-profit organization e-Learning for Kids in providing free English courses for children.

We want to contribute to reach the second goal from United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals, which is to achieve universal primary education by developing and providing high quality online English learning for kids. In order to reach those kids who cannot afford education, we need to work with foundations like e-Learning for Kids.

To read the rest of the news go here

Stephan Stephensen