Be sure to check-out my “All-Time Best” collections of different resources, which highlight the best sites over the past seven years.

Here’s another list in “The Best…” series, this time focusing on my least favorite subject — Math.

There are lots of websites that provide online activities for students to practice math skills.  In fact, I’ve got a ton of them on my Math page.  One of the next tasks on my agenda is to make a list in the near future ranking them.

Today’s list, however, ranks websites that help students practice math and provide superior English-language development opportunities.  That generally means that, in addition to showing a lot of numbers and text in an interesting way, that they offer audio for the text and numbers.  And that the audio has to be said in a speed accessible to English Language Learners.

In addition to the links to these sites in this post, you’ll be able to find them (and others) in the Math section of my English Themes For Beginners (which is different from my larger Math page).

As in my other lists, some of these sites may have been around prior to 2007 but, since I didn’t post about them until this year, I’m including them here.

These sites range in skills from beginning addition to advanced algebra.

And, now, for this year’s nine Best Math Sites For English Language Learners:

Number nine is Visual Math Learning Pre-Algebra Lessons.  It offers audio with text support and illustrations on a variety of math topics.  The audio is clear and at an accessible pace.  It has links to many good interactive math activities but, unfortunately, they don’t have audio.

Number eight is HippoCampus, which offers well-designed online textbooks with text and audio support.  It has ones for Elementary and Advanced Algebra.

I’ve ranked Harcourt’s That’s A Fact game number seven.  It reinforces elementary lessons, provides audio support to its text, and students like playing it.

Another Harcourt interactive, called Show Me, is number six. It walks students, step-by-step, through many math concepts.  It’s very well done.

I’ve ranked Brainpop as fifth on the list.  Brainpop has made it on a couple of my other lists, as well.  It’s one of only two sites that cost money to be ranked on any of these lists and, in fact, its one of the only two sites I’ve blogged about at all the entire year that require a paid subscription.  Their animated math movies (closed-captioned) and follow-up activities make it worth spending a few hundred dollars each year for it.

Harcourt makes it again as number four.  Their Fast Forward Math Glossary provides excellent audio and illustrated definitions of many math terms.

Holt, Rinehart and Winston’s Multilingual Glossary is number three.  In addition to showing the English definitions of math terms, at the same time it shows the definitions in the language of your choice (including Hmong!).

Number two consists of two separate sites — Villainy Mission One and Villainy Mission Two.  They teach geometry and algebra through a story “game” about bad people taking over the world.  Players have to stop them.  Besides it being a fun way to learn math, a lot, if not all, of what the characters speak is shown in text as well as heard.  It’s been developed by Thinkport in Maryland.

The number one-ranked math site for English Language Learners is….well, it’s actually three sites, all from the extraordinary Learn Alberta organization.  The three math sites are Math Under The Sea, Math 5 Live, and Spy Guys Math.  Instead of explaining each one, I’m going to suggest that they’re definitely worth the time to just go and check them out.

You can see all my “The Best…” lists at Websites Of The Year.

And, of course, you can find these links, along with 8,000 others, on my website.