Reg and Lellow
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On this site you can find a series of PowerPoint stories featuring the characters Reg and Lellow by Chris Roland.
The stories have been designed to help young children learn English and can be used in class with pre-school, infant and primary levels. As they have been written by an English teacher, they also have a |
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number of pedagogical features to aid language acquisition, make in class storytelling as easy as possible for the teacher and story content easily integrated into schools' English curriculum.
Reg and Lellow © Chris Roland 2008-2012
| You'll also find a new collection of stories appearing about this character. His name is Humphrey Bogin. I hope the stories about Humphrey provide you and your students with as much enjoyment as the Reg and lellow series.
© Chris Roland 2010 |
| The Criggle and Curl stories are a little bit different again. They are for teachers who want to introduce the phonemic script to their students early on. Please take a look! |  |
The Reg and Lellow stories make use of 'minimal contrastive pairs' such as Reg/red or Smol/small in order to aid positive differentiation. By presenting proper names such as Reg, Lellow, Smol and Blute with their corresponding characteristics of red, yellow, small and blue the idea is to encourage children to positively and actively notice the differences in sound and spelling. |
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There is also a high text-image correspondence, with each line of text being mirrored by a significant change in the illustrations, to help learners understand the words through a supportive pragmatic frame of visual reference. To help focus class attention on the significant changes in the illustrations, the pictures are simple with a generous use of white space.
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The themes are familiar for young children. They include going to bed, eating, not eating, wanting things, the limitations of physical size (being small, not being able to reach something), space, looking for someone, being happy or being sad. Consequently, the range of language includes things that they might actually want to say themselves, right now, in their |
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own 'child world' such as: I don't want to. I can't reach. That's naughty! The stories also use real, contracted language that native speakers might actually say!
There are also positive humanistic themes which run through the stories. The message is that ‘imperfections’ or differences are okay. Reg’s only got one arm – but that’s fine. Lellow hasn’t got any – but that’s fine too. Reg and Lellow aren’t the same size or colour – no problem. Recurring themes are co-operation, safety and well-being. |
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Many teachers prefer not to expose their very young learners to written English until they are familiar with the spoken form. Many Reg and Lellow audiences may also be too young to read. Therefore, every story comes in 3 formats. Version 1 is the standard text and image format. Version 2, which comes immediately after it on the PowerPoint document, has no text. Version 3 has partial text prompts. |  |
Whatever material a teacher is using, there's normally one or two things they would like to change about it (to take out a tricky word here or there for example). Unlike more commercial stories, Reg and Lellow are open documents, which means you can save them to your own computer and make changes - taking out the language you don't want and even putting in the language you do! |  |
In the same way that you can make changes to the text, you can also make changes to the images! Whilst copyright to the original stories and characters remains with Chris Roland, you are free to paste in clipart, images and to play around with the characters and storylines themselves - once you get the hang of grouping/ungrouping images on PowerPoint it can be a lot of fun! | |
The fact that Reg and Lellow are modifiable means that they can also be used for the purposes of teaching native English speakers or to teach languages other than English! | |
