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.

Yesterday I read an article at the page of “Anatarambana literatura infantil” about a book that last days was a cause of lots of controversies, the book is “Nicolás tiene dos papás” which translated into English is “Nicolás has two dads”. It is a Chilean book which, taking into account the huge sells numbers will appear in many schools, in the book we can see a very simple story of a boy who lives with his two dads, and they are a really happy family, the whole story is based in very simple sentences and images related with the pictures.

First of all I thought that the critics would focus on the idea of the family of Nicolás (of course the book received some hard critics from the religious institutions) but lots of the negative critics were based on another point, the literacy content. In the article I read the author criticizes the book not because he consider that the content was inappropriate, but just because if speaking about words, the book doesn´t offer too much, the author consider that the book is the perfect example of a book which idea of the content is quite good, but its literature value is terrible.

Is true that the history of Nicolás is a very minimalistic and poor in words creation, maybe the authors should focus not only on writing books with goods values like family values or a book that promotes respect to all the people but also it should offer some stories, some action and emotions, some relation between the different situations and words that the pupils will learn while reading the book.

My surprise and the interesting point of the article is the recommendation of another book about the same topic called ¡En familia! Written by Alexandra Maxeiner and Anke Kuhl. The difference between this book and the previous one is huge, “¡En Familia!” is also a simple book but it shows some real social situations, uses more sentences and makes the students to learn real facts about the different types of families and the differences between them.

I would like to know your opinion about this article and also to share some links about the topic with you.

Link to the online version of the book: http://www.movilh.cl/documentacion/nicolas-tiene-dos-papas.html

The article link: http://anatarambana.blogspot.com.es/2014/11/nicolas-tiene-dos-papas.html

An article that recommends another book about the different types of families: http://anatarambana.blogspot.com.es/2013/09/libro-recomendado-en-familia-de.html

This week’s project was related to creating our very own Classroom Library. It was a tough task to do, if we wanted to make it operative, attractive and affordable. There were plenty of things to be taken into account, but I was positive about not leaving aside what could help the students to get the most of the opportunity that having a Classroom Library can bring to their reading experience.

It would be naïve to think that students are going to read, just because we, the teachers, want them to do it. There must be something that ignites the intrinsic motivation that will create real long-lasting readers, and sometimes we have to make use of different strategies to get it.

You could think now that if you want them to read, you need books, and I agree, although paper books are not the only type of books that we can present to our pupils. In this case, my proposal is about an online resource that can be really useful for both pupils and teachers, and it could also involve parents in their children’s learning experience.

It is called Raz-Kids, and I had the chance to see how it works last year. This award-winning programme allows pupils to access to hundreds of levelled books (fiction and non-fiction), and they have the opportunity to read, listen to, or even recording the stories themselves. Apart from this, they can take some quizzes that will make them earn points to be used to create their own robots and reading rockets. This works wonders as extra motivation for the pupils, who want to read and take the quizzes to improve their level.

It sounds good for students, but…what does it have for the teachers? In fact, plenty of things. It allows not only to monitor the amount of reading done by each pupil, but also the quality of the reading. For example, and thanks to the quizzes that the students take so willingly in order to earn points, the programme generates a lot of useful information for the teachers, as shown in the next pictures.

The license is intended for a class of up to 36 students and 1 teacher. Each pupil has their own password, and the teacher can control some features for the pupils, such as the beginning level, if they can play or not with the robot, or if it is allowed for them to access books in Spanish.

If I had the chance to use it in my future jobs as a teacher, I would do it, no doubt. What about you? Do you consider it interesting? I am looking forward to have your feedback!

Thanks for reading, comments will be welcome

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

The teaching of both phonemes and graphemes is basic for teaching reading and writing, and it represents one of the biggest challenges to which past, present and future teachers, especially the ones working with Literature in any language, have to deal with. Depending on how the teacher prepares and leads the lesson, including the methodology carried out, the materials and resources used, the way of managing the situations, etc.; the teaching-learning process of phonics may be really motivating, fun and successful, or, on the contrary, it could become a really difficult task for both the teacher and the students, with boring lessons, confusion and even empty learning.

As we have seen in class, there is one method that teachers can follow, called Synthetic Phonics, which is aimed to teach reading and writing basing on how letters or groups of letters correspond with sounds -the link grapheme-phoneme-. As some of my classmates have already explained and demonstrated in their posts, like Susana’s or Miguel Ángel’s, this method has its advantages and disadvantages, and there is a really current debate between those experts that agree with it and consider it really useful and those that totally reject it.

In order to go further with the knowledge on it and be able to have a supported opinion about it, I decided to do some research about the method and about the most popular material to work Synthetic Phonics, which is called Jolly Phonics; and I found something that I considered it was worth it to share with you, hoping that you find it interesting too and useful for your training as future teachers: the five skills –taken as stages-, worked with Jolly Phonics, that are necessary to learn to read and to write.

To begin with, the first stage is the learning of the 42 main letter sounds –including digraphs, like oo, and the different sounds that they can make-, which is carried out through the connection between each sound with an action to represent it. The sounds are learnt following a particular order, from those simpler to those more complex.

Secondly, once children have learnt the sounds, they start the learning of letter formation, which involves children learning how to form and write letters with their pencil, and, as it occurs with the sounds, the learning goes from the most basic and used forms (i.e.: c, which could be used later to make d) to the most complex shapes.

Thirdly, the next stage consists on blending the individual sounds together to make up new words. During this process, it is important to know that we have to be aware of the fact that digraphs, despite of being represented by two letters, they are just one sound.

Then, the fourth stage is called segmenting, and it involves the identification of sounds in words, from the simplest (like cat) to the most complex. In this stage, tapping out the sounds while saying them may help (four taps = 4 sounds).

And the last stage is the learning of tricky words, which are those common words with an irregular spelling that cannot be read by blending. Some methods to learn them are: Look, Cover, Write and Check; Say as it sounds, Mnemonics, etc.

Finally, I would like to share with you the post written by Jaime, which presents a real experience in a classroom working with Jolly Phonics.

Hope you have found this first post interesting!

Rocío Hidalgo.