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.

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

And it was a great surprise for me when Raquel (our teacher) decided to show us some examples of a good storytelling.

We saw a video of an English storyteller named Michael Rosen about a chocolate cake, it was one of the most exciting stories I ever heard but not because of the story, which is interesting, but because of the way of speaking and representing of the author, he makes the story really funny and interesting, he creates the story in a way in which he is the main character and represent it in a really exaggerated way with a lot of gestures, mimic, screaming and noises in the story.

It surprised me to the point that I decidedto look for more stories and I found more stories about a watch, washing up and others shorter ones.

The topic was really interesting so I decided that I should show the story to some of my friends that has not a good level of English and check if they understood the story, and as I thought they got the whole idea of what is Michael Rosen talking about, not because of the words (they understood some of them) but because of the whole context of the video.

The class after that we returned to some videos of this brilliant novelist, but this time we were not only listening, but we were telling the story with the author, the first time we just listened to the story and the second one we represented the whole story with the help of the video at the same time. It was great, firstly I felt a little bit embarrassed but then I realized this is something really fantastic to learn because, in some way or another, all of us will work with children, and sometimes we will tell them some stories, I would like my stories would be as interesting as Michael Rosen’s ones.

Chocolate Cake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmeS6U_OcE4

Michael Rosen’s website: http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/

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!

I really enjoyed watching those videos; I think it was really funny for me and the rest of my classmates. We were really engaged with the stories and we couldn’t stop looking at that expressive face of Michael Rosen. In that moment I thought, “everyone loves this”, so if we, as adults, love that imagine children! I would be interested in the story even though I couldn’t understand a word of English, and in my opinion that’s really important, cause I realized that of course, share a language is important for having communication, but you can share and speak the same language but maybe you can´t transmit as much as Michael Rosen in one of his stories.

For that reason, I believe that storytelling is directly linked with literacy, (another topic we have been working with during the first week) cause not everything is the spoken language in communication. As we can see in Michael Rosen’s videos, he is using all the time gestures, using his arms, hands… and also the face, this is very important, because I think we all recognize a happy, sad, frustrated, worried… face when we watch it and this is also communication.

Apart from this, I have to add that the rhythm, musicality, the tone and volume of the voice and other facts also helps with the understanding of the story; it makes it less monotone and more attractive for children but also for adults. Also it is important the repetition of structures, words, sounds… these repetitions makes the story catchier and the proof of that is that when the video of the Bear Hunt finished, we were singing or murmuring all the time “we are going on a bear hunt, we are gonna catch a big one…”

Finally I would like to share the link of the video about the Bear Hunt in case you want to feel like Michael Rosen telling a story, hope you find it as funny as me.

http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/videos.html#bear

Video from http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/