This post comes a bit late, but I hope you can enjoy it as the rest that I have written, or even more

I have to say as well that it is the last post we have to make for this subject and, for this reason, I would like to do a little summary about the things I have learnt and I liked the most in this semester.

We started the subject with some content based things that we should now like the difference between phonetics and phonology, the meaning of literacy or the dimensions of literacy, but very soon we went into more practical activities in which we practice by ourselves the things we were learning.

I am sure that all or nearly all of my classmates can remember the “Chocolate cake” video of Michael Rosen, or the different versions of Cinderella (we even created a “map” with our own version), or the storytelling each group in our class created.

We also had some lessons in which we were responsible of creating activities with a QR code, a Glogster or even dress ourselves as one of the characters of Aladdin’s film because some students from a school had to come and we had to teach them some contents using the film.

People can think “well, you were just having fun in your lessons, but you did not learn anything”. And my answer to this is: you really do not know how good is to learn things at the same time as you are having fun with your teacher and your classmates.

I can say now, at the end of the semester, that I have learnt a lot of new things and I am also sure that my classmates and I are full of new resources, techniques, activities, contents and so on to face English Literature in our future lessons with Primary Students.

Just to finish with, I would like to say that my feelings about this last post are very different: on one hand I feel a bit more free now because I have felt a bit stress with all the projects we had to do, not only in this subject, but on the other hand, every time I look into the past (recent past) the things that I remember the most are the good moments I had as I was working on these projects and how many things I can do now that I could not do before.

Thank you very much for visiting!

For this week I would like to write a little bit about a new project that we have in this subject that I think we are all going to enjoy a lot. The project is about “Children’s literature workshops”

The first thing that the teacher did to catch our attention about the topic was to tell us that we were going to work with children. This can sound strange, because we are going to be teachers and we will deal with them every day, but as we are still in University, I think that this point is very important.

The reason why I think so, is because we are doing a lot of projects or presentations in which we have to imagine that our audience are children, but to know that, in this case, this is going to be true, I think that catches even more our attention and that we take this project with more energy.

Secondly, Raquel showed us some trailers about the films we could choose to be the topic for our workshops. As I could see in class, we were all (or nearly all); very excited to see again some of the films that we watched when we were little children. The possibilities were: The Lord of the Rings, Mary Poppins, Aladdin, The Jungle Book, Gulliver’s Travels and Snow White. At the end, Aladdin was the one who won.

I have to admit, that when the teacher told as that we all had to think about a different topics with the same film, I thought it would be a bit difficult. With this little sentence I would like to have a brief reflection: we you have to go deeper into the things that surround as, and not only what you can see with the naked eye. In this case it refers to see beyond in a film, but we can take this advice for a lot of situations in our daily life.

Later, we had time to reason about the specific topic we wanted to deal with. In my case, my group and I decided to make the workshop about “Life in the desert”. At the moment, we have a lot of ideas about how to make this very attractive for the children and, at the same time, that they learn a lot about the topic through a film that we all know.

I can not finish this post without saying that these kind of lessons give us a lot of opportunities to see more materials and resources that we can use in our future lessons, but also how to work with them correctly, which is also very important.

Thank you very much for reading my post and I wait for your comments and opinions!

I have decided to write about a webpage that I have found which could be interesting for all of us in our future lessons as Primary teachers.

This webpage is http://www.webenglishteacher.com , and here you can find a huge amount of resources, strategies and tips for vocabulary, writing, poetry etc. in English. As this blog is dedicated for Children’s Literature, I have accessed the part that says “Reading/Literacy” to see how good is this page for us.

This part is full of resources, and as in everything, some are good and some not so good (from my point of view, obviously). You can check them if you want so that you can also give your opinion about it, but I am going to talk about three of them that got my attention and that I think that are good and we could use in our future classroom.

The first one is the one called “Character Scrapbook”:

Here, you have to invent the name of a scrapbook (álbum de recortes) and the name of character. You can also decide if the character is a person or an animal and then create it by changing the hair, the eyes, the nose… As you can also see from the picture, you can also write ten things I know about… From my point of view, this can be very useful if, for example, we let our students to create a character and we tell them to build up a story in groups using the characters they have invented.

The second one is “Classroom Strategies”: this is a webpage where you can find templates about what to do before, during and after reading a book. As we have learned also in another subject “Designing and delivering effective lessons for the English Primary classroom”, it is very important to motivate our students to read, but also to scaffold the outputs they are going to produce with these readings.

And finally, the third one is related with the previous one: “103 things to do before/during/after reading”:

In this case, is not about templates, but activities that you can tell your students to do. Some of them are really interesting, such as creating an advertisement of the book as it were a film, to write a story about one of the characters like if he/she travels out of the book into today or to write an imaginary interview to the friends or family of a character.

As you can see, we can find lots and lots of resources, the only thing you need is some time to explore and critical thinking to realize what activities you can/should use at any time.

I invite you to surf in these pages and give me your opinions about it, or if you find any others also tell me

I hope you are all enjoying our comments.

For my second post I decided to talk about Julia Donaldson. This week in class we had the opportunity to know more about some English authors that write books for children. In my case, I had to look for information and I got very impressed about some of the things I found.

Julia is an English author that was into literature since she was very small, when she was used to write shows and choreograph ballets for her and her sister. She decided to study Drama and French at Bristol University, where she met a guitar-playing medic with whom she married.

The first thing that impressed me a lot is to know how she started: with busking. This is the practice of performing in public places and she did this with her husband, Malcolm. This led them to perform in TV programs for children and then even to publish some Cd’s.

Other thing that caught my attention and that I think it’s very important is her capacity to work with other people. As I said, she worked with her husband, but also with other professionals like the illustrator Axel Scheffler. An anecdote about her relationship with Axel is that they do not work “together”, Julia writes something and Axel sends her letters with the pictures he thinks are good for her books.

It was also very interesting for me that huge amount of different books she has written: poems, songs, educational books, audiobooks, phonic books…

There are a lot of interesting things that we could take into account about this author, for this reason, if you want to know more about her, here is her official web page.

From my point of view, this was a great chance to know what kind of literature we can show to our students. As we grew up reading Spanish literature, it is more or less easy for us to know what types of books are good for our future students but, in the case of English authors, I have to say that I was very lost.

In summary, I would like to say that I really enjoyed looking for information about Julia Donaldson and also hearing what my classmates had to say about other English authors.

To finish with, I would like to mention the other authors we dealt with in class, just in case you want to know them for your classes ;). They are Eric Carle, Beatrix Potter, E.B. White, David Shannon, Marc Brown, Roald Dahl, Maurice Sendak, Dr. Seuss and A.A. Milne.

I invite you to comment on the post and share your ideas!

Today I am going to write my first post for this blog and I have decided to do it about storytelling.

I think we all have read some books since we were very young, but have we thought about its importance? In this week, we have seen in class different examples of storytelling, first with some videos of Michael Rosen and his “We’re going on a bear hunt” and then with this little text:

Once upon a time there was a brave knight. One day he was riding through the forest when he met a beautiful princess. “What is your name?” he asked. “My name is Penelope” replied the princess. “Where do you live?” asked the brave knight. “I live in a big castle” the princess replied.

Suddenly a huge dragon appeared.” I am a dragon. I am going to eat you!” said the huge dragon. “Oh no!” said the princess. “Don´t worry” said the knight. “I am strong, I am fast and I am clever. I will fight the dragon”.

So the brave knight took his sword and fought the dragon. They fought and fought and fought and finally the brave knight killed the dragon.

The brave knight and the princess got married and they lived happily ever after.

I really enjoyed this class because I realized how easily we can catch our student’s attention. Storytelling can be used in many different ways, but we have to take into account things such as the age of our students, the topic or objective we want to deal with, the level of English they have… As every material we use in our classes, we have to know how to use them so that we take advantage of these resources. We can use storytelling just to have fun and improve our students’ linguistic competence, but it is a good method to introduce the topics, to learn new vocabulary or to improve their capacity of expressing themselves with their bodies, as example.

From my point of view, it is an activity that they are going to enjoy because it is very participative if we do it like we did in class: first the teacher tells the story making the gestures and then the students have to remember the story and try to repeat it as the teacher is making the gestures again.

With this kind of activities they are going to learn without noticing, and as we have seen in these years in the University this is the best way to learn things, without noticing.

And last but not least, I can’t finish this post without mentioning the thing that most impressed me in this class: The Kung Fu Rules! I am sure you are thinking “What’s the link between literacy and Kung Fu????” Here you have the answer.

It is a set of rules that reminds you that you have to write capital letters, full stops, comas, etc. by using some of the Kung Fu movements. I really liked this resource because I have never seeing something like it before and I think it can be very usefull for our students because they normally forget to writte capital letters and when they read they also tend to forget to stop, for example, when they see a full stop or a coma.

I hope you have enjoyed my post and I will be happy to see your comments and suggestions!

my name is Yolanda Hernández Trejo and I am studying Magisterio de Educación Primaria Bilingüe at the Centro Universitario Cardenal Cisneros. This year I am coursing the subject “Exploring Children’s Literature in English” and, as we are going to deal with very interesting topics, I am glad to share with you some thoughts and reflections I have about this subject.

I hope you enjoy it!