First of all we created new characters, creatures that are related to us and have some of our characteristics, or maybe not, maybe it’s our antagonist but all of them have something special that have been created starting from our imagination and they have a little bit of magic on them. After creating this magic, malicious, benevolent, hero we have mixed it with all the characters created by our mates; then we made groups of 5 – 6 people and then we picked again other characters different to the ones that we have created, so we have new ones.

Later on we will have to create and develop a story with those characters to create a poster for our new movie and then sell it to someone who will be interested on bringing our story to the big screen. We will see the results this week…

As a result of this activity, I was thinking on different ways to translate this to our future classrooms

and which has first come to my mind is “the traveller book” I’m sure most of you know what is this but for the ones who don’t know it… Is a book in which the students create their own story we can begin it in white or we can give them the beginning of the story, after that one of our pupils is going to take the book to its house to continue the story with the help of his parents. The main aim is that the students create a new page for the common story but taking into account what was written first to give the story the sense it has to have.

This could be another way to make our students create their own story and being creative and motivate moreover the attendant of the book could read the new part of the story on Mondays and the rest of the class could draw a picture based on its mates part of the story and then select one of the pictures from all and paste it in the book to make it funnier.

Could you imagine other activities like this to create collaborative and cooperative stories or books? I would be pleased of reading your comments and thanks for your attention.

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

After deep reflection and research, I realized that there are many different possibilities to offer our students with a rich variety of literature, with not too much money.

The principal one and probably the easiest is asking the students to bring their own books to the class to share with their partners. This is fantastic because we can develop other values such as generosity. Furthermore, there are a lot of disadvantages too. The first one is that we have to adapt our didactics projects according to the kind of literature provided by the students.  Another big problem is that, if we want to create a library in our mother tongue the variety of books could be great, but in a foreign language it is more difficult. Most of our students don’t have English books at home. We can to solve this problem by giving them strategies to find the books: Asking older brothers, other members from higher years of the school, cousins… However, this could be a problem too, because there are maybe some parents that don´t agree with idea of sharing and asking others. Anyway, I think taking some risks could be useful, and we should try it.

Another alternative is creating a collective project with the school, to get second hand books. I think this is great, but also we have to assume some risks. We are using the name of the school to carry out a volunteering campaign, and we are going to be responsible for its success or failure. In spite of this risk, if we are finally successfully, this could be a great benefit for all of the school, not just for you own class.

Of course, there are millions of ways to get books with a reduced budget, such as getting them in markets and second hand shops, creating agreements with the editorials… but, as in this post I am just mentioning ways to get free books, I would like to finish by sharing with you a very useful resource. This is the website www.nolotiro.org. In this website we can advertise our necessity of books, or even offer them to others. The involvement of the people in this site is huge. You can receive a lot of donated books. In fact, for my project, I have already advertised my demands.

I hope you find my post useful and I would like to encourage you to visit this website. There are a lot of people waiting for your help: maybe you can be a generous donor!

The activity is called “Create your reading map”. It consists in creating a drawing by using your imagination in order to transmit an idea or a story.

In class, first we practice doing one in common. We represented the story of Cinderella; one by one we were adding steps to the story until we finished the whole story. Then the teacher proposed us to do another reading map, but it had to be done individually and the topic was “the evolution of reading in our lives”.

By the time we finished this activity we showed our drawings to the rest of the class and in pairs we discussed about their meaning and so on. Furthermore, I can say that I found this activity very useful for remembering how my reading skills and likes were changing through my life and the fact of doing it by this way made it much more interesting, so I wondered if this kind of activity can be used in other circumstances.

However, I´ve been thinking about it and the main points that involve this type of activity are: assessment, reviewing, cross-curricular and visual-spacial intelligence.

For instance, if teachers show this kind of activity to their pupils, and connect it with assessment and reviewing with an example, children may feel attracted with the idea of creating their own reading maps, so that, they can check their knowledge of the content in a more dynamic way. Nevertheless, if we think about multiple intelligences, this idea will be especially beneficial for those children whose visual-spacial intelligence is more developed and who prefer to study using a visual learning style.

In addition, to improve this activity, it would be easy to link it with other subjects apart from English, and make this activity a cross curricular one.

In a nutshell, as I’ve already said this activity can be used in an unlimited different ways, it also can be involve more than one subject as a cross curricular task and it can be helpful for children, mainly for those who prefer to study using a visual-spacial learning style.

I hope you liked my post and if anybody has a picture of his reading map, it would be grateful to paste it in your comments.

http://www.mindmapart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Space-Reading-Mind-Map.gif

Those horrific stories were originally passed on orally from generation to generation until some writers, such as Perrault, Brothers Grimm or Walt Disney decided to convert the tales into books and films, making some changes until the stories evolved to the current happy tales we all know.

This is what we were learning during the last week’s medium group session, when we read two versions of Cinderella, Perrault’s and Grimm Brothers’, and compared them with the one we have watched in the Disney film. I was really impressed about the evolution of the story and the big differences among the versions; and, as I really liked discovering this, I would like to share with you the real cruel stories of some beautiful tales that we all know (I wish I do not ruin your childhood… :P).

Firstly, we can start with the innocent Little Red Riding Hood. In our version, she disobeys the advice of her mother in her way to visit her grandmother and walks slowly and entertains through the dangerous forest. Then, as the wolf is faster, he arrives earlier to grandmother’s house. He eats her, dresses up with grandma’s clothes, waits for the girl and eats her too. But a hunter discovers what happened and takes a knife to open the wolf’s abdomen; so, Caperucita and her grandmother go out of the wolf, they fill his abdomen with stones and finally the thirsty wolf goes to drink water to a lake, falls down and sinks because of his weight. However, the original version is more sadistic, as the wolf makes Little Red Riding Hood drink her grandmother’s blood before carving up and eating her. (You can find the different versions of Little Red Riding Hood here).

Goldilocks and the Three Bears is one of the most changed stories. We think that Goldilocks is a curious little girl who discovers the three bears’ house and touches some furniture and eat some soup before she sleeps in one of their beds. When the bears come, they get angry because someone has been in their house, but when they find Goldilocks in the bed, she is faster that the bears and escapes through the window before they kill or eat her; or, in other more recent versions, the bears behave well and even help her. Contrary to that, in the original version, Goldilocks was an old and hungry woman that was tortured by the bears and impaled in the spire of the bell tower. (You can find other versions of Goldilocks and The Three Bears here and here).

In case of The Lion King, the king is killed by his jealous brother and his son wants revenge. Although Rosencrantz (Timon) and Guildenstem (Pumba) try to distract him, he finally kills the jealous brother. And actually, in some versions, everyone dies.

Finally, I would like to share with you some interesting links where you can find more information about this topic: all versions of one tale, the history of the evolution of some stories; the reasons why each version was like it was depending on the social, economic, political and cultural circumstances, etc.:

• The real stories behind these Disney Movies will ruin your childhood
• The real stories behind 9 Disney Movies
• Top 10 gruesome fairy tale origins
• Children tales as they used to be (in Spanish)
• When children literature was for adults (in Spanish)
• The Real Snow white: Maria Sophia Margaretha Catharina von Erthal in Carmen’s post in this blog.

‘I wrote when I didn’t know life. Now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no more to write. Life cannot be written, life can only be lived’.  

These great quotes were written by Oscar Wilde. He is very known worldwide for its main works such as: ‘The picture of Dorian Gray’; ‘De profundis’ where he shows that the fact of suffering gives a way to live; its masterpiece ‘The importance of being Ernest’ where describe and talks about marriage in an humorous way, or ‘The ballad of Reading Goal’ which was written after his release in Reading’s prison because Wilde was convicted of homosexual.

Apart from these works, the Irish writer published many stories that later editorials adapted to children such as: ‘The Happy  Prince’, ‘The Canterville Ghost’, ‘The Model Millionaire’, ‘The Selfish Giant’, ‘The Star-child’… Through these stories the reader gets excited because perceives tenderness, friendship, love, mystical ideas, reality-fiction, all are mixed concepts that make the reader think and until one is moved to tears.

With all of this, I would like to say that the Oscar Wilde’s adaptations (the last ones I mentioned) are a very proper resource to use in the Language Classroom for children. They are touching, short and easy to read and to understand, perfect to perform in which students are part of the story and involved in the performance. I read these short stories in the 6^th year of Primary School in English classroom, since then I was shocked about these stories and this author and then I grew up and I had the opportunity to read its works more complex (poems, theatre…).

When I was a child I loved reading. But what I liked the most was that my parents read me stories, tales, and all I had to read; As well, when reading time I used to read aloud so everyone (I mean to my parents) could hear me (but the roles have changed because now I love reading to children, and it is something that inspires me…). When reading aloud I thought (and think) that it was one strategy to understand better what I was reading. In fact, in the English Classroom at School the teacher recorded us when reading a book, and then the cassette was given to our parents in order to see what we used to do in class, I love this kind of activities. For this reason, when learning new languages is very useful to record oneself talking, I know it sounds quite embarrassing hearing your voice, but from my own experience it is totally effective and I have learnt that  is an ideal activity to improve our Speaking and Reading skills. It is something which agrees all language teachers  with I have had and they usually say to do this kind of activities.

And last but not least and for all these reasons, I decided this time to film a video recording myself reading ‘The Selfish Giant’,  (The Oscar Wilde’s adaptations I mentioned before), a lovely story by the way. It is a didactic resource, or better called an ‘audio book’. The video would be a didactic example/proposal  to do with students. I found many ‘audio book’ on the internet with drawings, images… in order to practice with our students.

You can watch it here, hope you like it.

(If you have problems opening the video, you can update the web page again, and  cross fingers)

Interesting information: Oscar Wilde studied at ‘The Trinity College’ (founded in 1592). Noted people such as Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Beckett studied at this relevant University, among others.

       Trinity College (Dublin)

Bibliography:

• ‘The Canterville Ghost and Other stories’- Oscar Wilde. Oxford Progressive English Readers (2004)

On the other hand, the interaction with each other it is going to develop our second language while we speak with the partner answering and asking the questions purposed in the picture of the ”hand of questions”. This picture will going ensure that every questions raised in the class before, are going to be asked by the students. The way of make the interview taking out middle of the class, and lending the rest ones choosing a picture of the ones that were out, is good, because you’re going to avoid the typical pairs of children in class, and with this we are going to guess a full interaction with different ones apart from their normal friends.

The setting and the proposal of showing the pictures as we were in a museum it’s funny and you can observe more in depth the ones that you like more. The pictures could be shown through presentations, but I prefer this way because it motivate us to examine all the pictures with the same interest.

The idea of the reinforcements it’s good for us but not neccesary, but for children, you must do it, because they need to feel considerate by the others, but in addition, I want to say that it is possible to increase the motivation of the pupils, if you purpose that the day of the museum, the class will be chose the best picture of all, so every child will make as better than they can for been the winner of the activity. And finally the teacher could give to the best picture a little present to the child for him as a new reinforcement.

In conclusion I think that this activity was successful for everyone, because everybody has been feeling comfortable during the whole activity and there wasn’t any moment in which the students were upset. So I recommend to all who reads this entrance, to use this type of activities in the class. If you use this developments you will have success.

During this post I would like to tell you about an activity we did this week about some of the most manful authors in the area of the children’s literature. In this activity we made groups of three people approximately and each group had an author allocated. The whole activity consists in getting information about our author and after that presenting it in front of the rest of our mates. Honestly I have to say that I really love this kind of activities in which there is a cooperative learning involved, that is because in one part the group which is presenting is teaching and that’s a great training, and on the other hand we have the other group which is going to be not only learning but also watching their peers and getting ideas about ways of teaching and also things to improve and good points.

So the author allocated to my group was David Shannon, who is not only an author but also an illustrator, in my opinion the most incredible thing about David Shannon is the fact that he wrote his first book at the age of 5, it is called “No David!” and it is composed mostly by illustrations, the book narrates the story of a child which is scolded during the whole story with the words “No David”. An incredible fact is that the most important awards in David Shannon’s life are because of that book and the first one he wrote. The School Library Journal called the book as the Best Book of the Year, and it was on the New York Times on the Best Illustrated Book list.

I consider it is a really great author, and even more in the first steps of the children with the literature, taking into account that David Shannon’s books are based in illustration and there isn’t too much text in them, which will make the children easier to read it and understand it. Also a really interesting thing of our author that I would like to mention is a quote we found in which David says “I try to have fun when I’m making a book” and I consider that is one of the most important things to take into account but not only if speaking about books, also if speaking about teaching, I really believe that if we will try to have fun while teaching, our students will also have fun learning :).

Source: tumblr.com

 As I am sure that, as current and future teachers, we should encourage our students and kids to read and show them how many benefits reading has, I would like to share with you the two activities we carried out at the library that I liked the most and I believe that they were useful on promoting us to read:

On the one hand, the “Making a story up”, an activity that consisted on playing in groups with different labels (in my case, ten labels, but in depends on the age and number of kids) with single words. We had to discuss about them to create a story in which those words were all included and produce our own book by writing the story on big cardboards and decorating them with drawings that represented the situations described. Then, the books were kept on a special shelf on the library to let everyone read them. I loved that activity, as the process of making the stories up was really fun, the stories were really interesting due to the imagination we have when we are kids, and they promoted not just reading, but creativity, working in groups and other social abilities, linguistic and artistic skills, and furthermore the satisfaction of having your own book “published” and read by other people.

On the other hand, and related to some posts written two weeks ago, “The storytelling theatre”. In this game, each monitor was in charge of one group of kids who were going to become storytellers and represent their corresponding story, using puppets, in a little theatre, in which we were hidden behind. For that, the monitor chose who was going to be each character and we read the story all together, each kid their lines, and practising with the puppets. Finally, the stories were represented in the little theatre, so that we became storytellers but also enjoyed the other stories.

I hope you find those activities interesting, and it would be great if you are encouraged to share your own personal experiences in reading or interesting activities you know for the promotion of reading.

Thank you for your visit!

First of all we were talking in small groups about those things we remembered of our childhood. Once we were putting it in common with the rest of the class there were diversity of memories. However, there was something that I was a bit shocked about.  There were some of us who agreed on the fact that reading when we were teenagers was so boring. Why does it happen? Does it depend on students who do not like reading or is the study planning the responsible of that?

Based on my own experience, I have to admit something. At the age of twelve, reading was the most boring, disgusting and senseless activity I had to face with. At the school I enjoyed reading, as I said I loved books such as Kika’s adventures, meanwhile once I entered in the high school I started reading for obligation and I stopped considering reading as a fun activity.

I remember myself reading a huge amount of books, doing a summary of all of them, doing exams, reading them as much quickly as possible and even crying because I could not finish one of them on time. In my opinion, and I would like to know yours, it should not be like that. Nowadays, it is said that young people read less or even do not read at all. I was lucky because I discovered again the meaning of reading for pleasure but I am asking now how many of my classmates stopped reading at the age of 12 or 13 years old and have not taken a book since then.

As a conclusion I would like to say that we, as teacher, should be aware of these facts and think in our experience. We know what we liked doing or not, so we should try to keep it in mind. Reading for pleasure in my case is one of my favourite hobbies, I love having some free time and enjoying of a good book. For that reason I think that the first thing we should do is to help our students to have fun when reading instead of reading a lot of boring books in a short period of time without any sense at all.