This project consisted on the creation of a twenty minutes workshop focus on one topic and with a special context, the story of Aladdin.

Firstly I am going to talk about the preparation of these kind projects. I have to said that although prepare activities for twenty minutes look very easy, we have to take into account that this activities should be significant. It means, for me it has not sense prepare activities just for spend time. Significant learning should be included. Furthermore we wanted to include the use of ICTs and it gave an extra difficulty to the preparation. The reason was that we had to take into account the level of the students and the possibility of have technical problems, such as internet problems. In addition, this preparation also included the creation of a catchy environment. For me it was the hardest and the funniest part of the project. The hardest because we created a “jaima” in the class and we had to bring a lot of very heavy material such as carpets. The funnies because, although we spent a lot of time, we enjoyed a lot the process.

Moreover the day of the workshop was very different of what I though. Improvisation is the best word to define my feelings of this day. For example, during the first performance we ran a lot to achieve the time, but suddenly we discovered that we had ten minutes more. In this time we started to include new element such a choreography that we have prepared for be done just by us. Also in other performances the time was shorter, and we had to delete some activities from our plans.

But finally the results were unbeatable. I am really proud of what we did, and also I think that I learned a lot from this experience. Now I fell that I am more prepare for the management of student, for the inclusion of literature elements in the workshops, for the control of the time of the activities and my self-confident with students has grown since this moment.

In conclusion I fell satisfied. And as this is probably my last post I will like to say good bye and mention that it was a pleasure shared my posts with all of you.

I have written since I can remember. Sometimes I just let my imagination take me wherever it wanted to go, and wrote until my eyelids dropped. Other times, I had to push myself in order to get something readable that met the established criteria for a given task. But every time, I did my best to make it work.

A few weeks ago, our teacher asked us to create a Fairy Tale Character. Yes! I thought. That was possibly the best chore I had this semester. She provided us with a template (included below) that we had to use to make this character as real as possible. We were required to create the psychological aspects of the characters, more than the usual physical descriptions. And depending on how comfortable students felt about dealing with feelings, some of us were thrilled to bits, while others thought OMG! How are we going to do this?

And here is the point. Creating a character requires, and deserves, a level of commitment that transforms the task into something serious. You need to be able to put yourself on your character’s shoes, and the last item of the template (Your personal connection with the character), allowed me to think that it could have a further use, such as including our characters in a story. In the end, if you have created them, who could understand them better than yourself?

But that wasn’t the case. This week, the teacher told us that we would be required to write, in groups of four or five people, the plot of a story, using characters created by others. It made everything much more difficult and challenging. What if the creators of Alexiah, Mr. Fitman, Guffita or Wickedmore (the characters my group had to include in our story) don’t like what we have done with them? That was my biggest fear when we started working on the project.

Now the project is almost done, and we have to present it to the rest of the class. I wonder what would be left of the character I create. I know how she thinks, I know what she wants. Will she behave the way I expect? I will have the chance to check it next Tuesday. I can’t wait.

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.

Today I am going to share with you the last project we are carrying out, the Aladdin’s workshop; and particularly, the workshop my group and I are preparing: Discovering the cultural secrets of Arabia.

During the last two weeks, we have been preparing a workshop that we are developing next Tuesday, 25^th November, with a group of students from a public school in Alcalá de Henares.

The pillars of this project are the powerful and multiple uses of children films in education. I think that all of us are sure that every film, even those that we think are simple and with a basic plot, can be used in many different ways to present the contents to kids through a motivating, enjoyable and cross-curricular methodology, and interesting and close materials and resources.

For this project, the workshops are devoted to teaching Science contents through English and through Aladdin’s film. For that, we are working on six different workshops, each of them dedicated to one Science topic; using the characters, places, elements and other aspects present in Aladdin’s film as the medium to carry out the teaching-learning process.

In my case, my group decided to work on Arabian culture (“The secrets of Arabia”), as the film is constantly presenting, both directly through the dialogues or songs, or indirectly, by just showing them in the scenes, the main aspects of that area and its culture: places in Arabia, artistic elements such as the decoration of the streets or houses, the music, instruments and dances; market products like food or ornaments, animals, monuments, laws and rules, clothing, social classes, gender differences (men vs. women), religious beliefs, etc.

As you can see, there is an enormous amount of elements that we can work on. However, we are only having twenty minutes to develop the whole workshop, so we have chosen the four following topics for teaching them directly:

1. Geography: Location of Arabia in the world map and the Geography of the country.
2. Market: products sold in markets and ways of buying them.
3. Palace: social classes and laws of Arabia.
4. Palace Gardens: Art, music, instruments and dances.

Furthermore, we have to take into account that we are living in the era of technology, so we are introducing ICTs in almost every corner. Then, the whiteboard will be used to show the maps and to present the Palace rooms in which the students will click to see the different laws of Arabia; and a computer is used to watch the Arabian dance and listen to the song while learning the choreography.

Finally, to conclude the workshop, we are letting the kids use their cameras to feel like tourists and take pictures or selfies in every corner, and we are giving them a souvenir from Arabia to thank them for their visit and wish them a good day.

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!