Hello everyone, I hope you all had a good weekend!

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!