First of all I have to say that the location of the lesson was in the gym instead of in a regular classroom and what we were going to do there was more related with a theatre or body expression class than with a literature lesson. At the beginning we all were a little bit shy and afraid of doing what Raquel asked but little by little we were more relaxed.

Although the lesson was different and I felt a bit confusing it was really funny, enjoyable and original. We all participated in a very active way being volunteers or being a part of a performance, and I thought…why not using this with primary students to develop literature? It may seem crazy or difficult to carry it out but not impossible, besides it has a lot of adaptations for everything we want to teach.

So what are the advantages of using theater in school?

-It develops children imagination, creativity and the different ways of expression, not only language using all the senses.

-It gives advantages to the relationships between peers and the teacher.

-Children assimilate better the concepts and knowledge if they have to represent any idea of a subject.

-Doing theater in the class help students to talk in front of an audience, being more self-confident, to get over shyness and to express their ideas and feelings.

-It reinforces the academic task as language, reading and literature through theater plays and roles.

-Using theater in the classroom introduce children into art and history.

Some of these ideas are from a very interesting blog I found called Tiching Blog and I recommend you to take it a look. Here is the link http://blog.tiching.com/el-teatro-una-herramienta-mas-en-el-aula/

In my opinion we should use more theatre in class and body language because it has a lot of advantage we can use in many different ways. It was very nice to do all those activities and think how we could adapt them to a literature class. I enjoyed so much the lesson, the hours flied and I learnt a lot.

For the activity that we designed we were all dressed-up as characters from Aladdin’s film. And the plot of our activity begins by the time the Genie comes back from his trip around the world. Then in the activity the Genie appears with loads of presents that he took for Aladdin and Jasmine. During the activity children have to classify all the presents that the Genie bring for them depending on the country that the presents came from and by the time they finish it they have to define the route that the Genie follow during his holidays around the world.

It was a really fun and interesting project in which all of us learnt and had a great time, although it would be hard to say who enjoyed it more; the children or us.

Secondly I´m going to talk about the THEATRE activity that we did this week, which personally I think that it has loads of possibilities.

As I’ve just said, during this week we used the theatre as a tool for bringing English to students in a motivational way. Now I’m going to explain some of them.

For the first activity there need to be at least two pairs of people. The members of each pair have to be sitting in a single line and the one that is behind has to pretend that his arms are his partner´s arms. So once the two pairs are prepared, they will have to play a role such as pretending to be in a job interview, while the audience (the rest of the class) asks them questions.

In addition, in the next activity the students will form groups of four to six people. Then, two of them will be playing a role in which they are friends and for example, they are talking about the last holidays of one of them. While they are speaking the rest of the group members have to perform what the others are saying.

In conclusion, I think that these two activities can easily be done with primary students and also, they can be used as a cross-curricular activity, in order to review and learn almost every topic that they study at class in any other subject.

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That is why we had to work in groups of three people, in most cases with those who, for any reason, we hadn’t had the chance to do it before, and prepare a 5-minute presentation to try and convince our classmates that the author we had become experts in (or kind of), deserved to be chosen as the most relevant in Children’s Literature.

It must be said that I wasn’t aware of the exciting life that most of them had/are having, and I am truly convinced that Roald Dahl, which was the one that my group was in charge of presenting (thanks Ali and Carmen!), should be at the very top of that list. Not only was he a writer, but also a pilot and even a spy. Moreover, his strong desire to help his children, made him design a valve to solve one of his son’s medical conditions… He was a truly interesting man.

Anyway, is it enough (having an exciting life, I mean) to be considered as the best author? Probably not, but if you scratch a little bit, you will find that he won not only some of the most important prizes regarding Children Literature, but also gained the respect of his profession. Not everybody can say that there is a prize named after them, nor a Museum devoted to his works.

Nevertheless, every minute of the presentations was worthy, because the other groups did a great work introducing David Shannon and his No, David!, Eric Carle and The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Julia Donaldson and The Gruffalo, Maurice Sendak with Where The Wild Things Are, Marc Brown and his aardvark Arthur, Dr. Seuss and The Grinch, or E.B. White with Stuart Little. And there are more yet to be presented.

I guess that next time I go to a bookshop, I will look at the Children’s Literature shelves with more acknowledging eyes.

During this week I was investigating with my peers about what makes an author the best.  The researching led me to evaluate the greatness of many authors and its origin. However after the thorough analysis I found out that the keystone is not the greatness itself but the target group and the aim.

With the information that I have acquired during this week I have made a classification of some authors taking into account the needs of the pupils.

To start with this classification as I said in my previous post I think the best author to work on contents is Eric Carl. His works are full of curricular questions (as in the book the very hungry caterpillar) and although for me is not the most important thing he created his very own book illustrations. It brought the right balance in the book composition and extra understanding support.

Moreover to promote good behaviors in my opinion the best author is Mark Brown with the Arthur´s books. These books are full of adventures but with the strangeness that the main character story is developed in a school scenario therefore the students will easily identify themselves. I believe that in this way we can promote modelling behavior attitudes.

Otherwise to deal with phobias or fears, my chosen author is Maurice Sendak. He is the writer of “Were the wild things are” and I think this book is advisable for everybody even adults. In my opinion we can extrapolate any fear to this story in order to overcome it.

Finally to encourage the students to write and read I have chosen two authors: Julia Donaldson and Alan Alexander Milne. I have chosen Julia Donaldson due to her book “The gruffalo”. This book is full of creativity and it explains how we can create real things using our imagination. That is the same that happen when we write; we are creating just from our imagination.

As well A.A. Milne came to my mind because of Winnie Pooh´s stories. This author created an imaginary world for his own son so it is specially tailor made for the children´s attention. With books like this we can foment the interest of our students to read. I have realized that reading is one of the best things that we can instill in our pupils.

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First, we took some videos of Michael Rosen, who is an English children’s novelist, as a good example of storytelling. Then we analyze curiously the characteristics that made Rosen´s stories catchy for children and even for adults. We conclude that there are plenty of things that make his stories so attractive, such as the repetition of grammatical structures and vocabulary, the mystery included in his stories, the first-person narration and all the gestures, voice intonations, noises and funny things that make the auditor feel involved by the story and its characters.

After this analysis, we thought about new innovative ideas that could improve Rosen´s story according to CLIL. Finally we thought about some useful ideas, for instance, it would be motivating to activate the children´s prior-knowledge by asking them if they like chocolate cakes, or what would they do if they were the protagonist of the story. Moreover it would be eye-catching to introduce pictures, visuals, encouraging them to repeat the body language of Rosen and pre-teaching some of the difficult vocabulary words that appear in the story.

Although we proposed some great ideas, the teacher showed us more ideas to create extra tasks for each story. The one that I really liked was called “Kung Fu Punctuation Poster” it consisted in practicing some different Kung Fu techniques in the air while reading the story, but they have to do a specific melee attack depending on the punctuation mark that they´ve just read. For example, each time that they had to stop reading due to a dot, they have to punch the air while saying “ha”.

We also saw another model of story in which for every action and noun that appear in the story the students have to imitate the gestures that the teacher does, so that it could be more attractive for the students.

 Finally, the teacher told us to create our own story using the previous one as a model, so that, every group could prepare a different story but using the same structure, we have to develop our own gestures for the different verbs, adjectives and nouns of the story and try to link it to other subjects apart from English in order to make the story educational.

 So next week I will write about how the activity resulted in class.

Michael Rosen´s chocolate cake story

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BxQLITdOOc

Kung Fu Punctuation Poster:

http://displays.tpet.co.uk/?resource=1264#/ViewResource/id1264

Jaime García

I am Beatriz Sandoval, a student of 4th year Primary Teacher Degree (English Specialization) at Centro Universitario Cardenal Cisneros.

This blog is aimed at dealing with Children’s literature in English or English as a foreign language. You will find activities, resources, reflections about teaching English for a Primary Education classroom.

I hope you find useful this blog.