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.

This is why I am totally sure that our students will have fun if we let them the opportunity to take pleasure in this kind of classes. That is why, I am going to remind you some of the interesting and enjoyable activities we can take into account from our Exploring Children´s Literature subject by Raquel Fernández.

First of all we played introductory and motivating games, such as “Frozen Characters”, to make us feel comfortable and awake. In this game, some music was played, and when it stopped, we had to represent a fairy tale, superhero or other similar character, without moving. Imagination and body representation were clearly being developed in the students.

Aladdin´s carpet, Snow White, etc.

After that, we played some games that required group participation to achieve the objectives. One of these games was “Frozen Scenes”.  In this activity we had to represent, without moving, one scene we chose of a given film, for instance Aladdin or Snow White. Imagination, body representation, cooperation and communication are reinforced with this kind of games.

Snow White´s scene.

To end with, we played a fun game. “Invented Machine” was a cool down game in which, one person, as a beginner, had to make an invented movement and sound. Then, one by one, the rest had to join into the machine making a new movement and sound, having coherence with the ones that were already made by others. Finally all of us built an amazing fancy machine. It was a nice end of the class, because all of us contributed to achieve the same thing. Pure imagination and body representation was developed in this activity.

Other games we played, that I would like to mention are: “Good Morning Walk”, “Building a new Scene”, “Alphabet Conversation”, “Photo Describing” and “Moving arms and Conversation Coordination”. If you are interested in knowing what they were about, just leave a comment and let me know.

As we know from our childhood and know now from our own experience, you might agree with me that this kind of games are really motivating for students. They are a way of combining learning with having fun (that is why I call them games all the time), in which children develop multiple intelligences such as Kinesthetic or Interpersonal; involving and building up some skills as imagination, communication and creativity. At the same time contents of different topics can be adapted to these games and taught in a cross curricular way.

Again, university is giving us training and resources to show our best in education, and to make students´ learning be the best and enriching thing of their lives.

As a consequence of the previous ideas, if we bear in mind the didactic implications of this conception, some of us have a lack of confidence in teaching poetry.  Because of these reasons, lessons such as the one that we had in the subject Children’s Literature in English, can be quite useful to improve our literature didactic skills.  During the first part of the lesson, we knew some interesting and useful websites to introduce poetry to our future students. And we prepared a poem performance in groups. It was a fantastic approach to know more about teaching and learning poetry.

From then on, I decided to make some research on the teaching of poetry and I found a source that could be useful for us:

The Poetry Trust, according to its official website, is “one of the UK’s flagship poetry organizations, delivering a year-round live and digital program, creative education opportunities, courses, prizes and publications”.

One of the most interesting publications of this organization is  The Poetry Toolkit (foolproof recipes for teaching poetry in the classroom). It is a guide with lots of activities and didactic possibilities that can be applied in the classroom. Besides, this document reflects on how hard it can be for teachers and students to understand poetry. It also encourage teachers to try the proposed activities by themselves, before they use these ones in their work with students. The main aim is that teachers gain an idea of the nature of each task and its possibilities.

An interesting activity designed by Amanda Dalton is Poem Jigsaws (Choosing the right word). To develop this activity, we provide pairs of students with a poem that has been cut up into words that they have to put together again as they want. The aim of the activity is not based on reconstruct the original composition, but to create something new and original. Through this task we help our students to understand some features of poetry such as: word order, syntax and language.

Due to the fact that we, as future teachers, should try these activities, I prepared my own Poem Jigsaw using a sample of the poem A Birthday written by Christina G. Rosetti:

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickest fruit;

Set of words that belongs to the original poem A Birthday.

Final result: a Poem Jigsaw.

In the described publication there are much more interesting activities that we can use with pupils. I recommend you to read this useful publication and to do other new activities.  

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!

A few days ago, Raquel, our literature teacher made us think about how working poetry and tales with children. Moreover, she made us see some resources to take them as an example and how to create our own personalized writing works.

For these reasons, as we saw many resources to work with poetry I want you to try two examples of web pages that deal with tales and poems and help students to create them by following some specific steps:

– To begin with, I found the website “story jumper” in which you are provided by different options to create your own story book but also in here you have the opportunity to publish it when it is completed and to read other participant’s books.

In these one you are able to write whatever story or poem in a free way by being helped by the props it is offered to you. You can include your own photos, different scenes and a beautiful hardcover and if you like the result of your story you can print it as well.

Finally, if you published your book, people are able to read it, comment it and to vote it, so this one could be chosen as the best one in the library.

– The next webpage is called “story bird”. This one is also based on creating tales and poems books but it is basically focused on work in classrooms. This means that teachers would create an account and add the students are going to participate in order to make a “classroom net library”. In this you have to tap the year you are going to work with, the language and the country, so it fits to the class is going to use it.This webpage provides students an amount of images firstly. These ones can be infant images such as heroes, princesses, animals… Then, you have to select the kind of writing you want to work on, so you can choose among Long form books, which has multiple chapters; Picture book, which involves only one chapter but with several pages; and Poems, which is composed by only one page.

Finally, you can save your storybooks and poems and to share them with classmates.

I hope you to try them and to comment if you like them or not. In my opinion, I consider that we can use them if we want to work on literacy in class. Although they don’t provide us with too much language scaffolding, they encourage children to create their own works and are useful for us to manage this “difficult” but amazing topic.

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!

When I was in my last practice time, my tutor and I had a problem: “How we can teach children to use the auxiliary verb ‘do’ in negative sentences without making the explanation boring?” and there was where my mind starts to think about a way to explain it without saying the grammar part. We have to take into account that children of 6-7 years didn’t know how to build correctly a sentence (subject + verb + complements) at this time of the course, because this part was later.

Talking to my tutor, she told me that she thinks about creating a character named Mr. Do who needs the negative particle ‘not’ to appear and help them to create the negative sentence. So, starting from this idea, I decided to give our character a “body”, in order to help children with it, because if children see that Mr. Do exists, they pay more attention to our explanation and they also remember what Mr. Do wants to help us.

But all this thoughts could be nothing if Mr. Do doesn’t work in class and teach children how to create the structure of a negative sentence. To know that, we have to apply it in our class, so my tutor called all the children to the “assembly space” and introduce Mr. Do with questions to the children, for example:

• Teacher: Alejandro, do you like apples?
• Alejandro: Yes, I do
• Teacher: Ok, and, Lucia, do you like bananas?
• Lucia: No, I don’t (because children knows how to answer correctly that questions)
• Teacher: Ok, so, to learn how to say that Lucia doesn’t like bananas, we need “Mr. Do”
• Children: Mr. Do???
• Teacher: Yes, Mr. Do is a special guest for saying that we don’t like something. So, he will help us if we give him our ‘not’ of the sentence. For example: I wrote “I like apples”, but, how I can say that “I not like apples”? I need Mr. Do, who helps me if I give him… what Mr. Do needs?
• Children: The no!!!
• Teacher: That’s right! So, he will come to our sentence (I do not like apples) and we write I don’t like apples.

I think this method can work to teach children how to make a negative sentence if they don’t know “conscientiously” how to create a sentence, and, from this experience, I knew that they like the character because they told me “Jaime, will you bring back Mr. Do again?” and I have to answer that I don’t know because Mr. Do is too busy working for other children.

To end the post, I leave you here a question: Do you think this kind of resources will help children to learn better?

Last session was very interesting for me. We had the opportunity to know some children’s literature authors that I have never seen before. Some of them had really famous works but I did not know the writers.

All of them are very good at their jobs and they have won important literature awards, but now, I would like to talk about the one I researched, specially, about her most important book: The Gruffalo (Julia Donaldson).

The Gruffalo was published in 1999 and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. It was written in verse, as most of the Julia’s works. The story is about a mouse that is going to be eaten by some dangerous animals (a fox, an owl and a snake). The mouse uses his intelligence by inventing an imaginary monster, called Gruffalo, to scare the rest of the animals and…as an element of surprise, the Gruffalo becomes real. I am not going to disclose the end because you need to read it! :).

The Gruffalo also has his own website, that I recommend you to know more about this interesting story: www.gruffalo.com

This website is a good bidirectional resource: our students can use it by their selves and also it is very useful for teachers. In this website it is possible to find lots of interesting resources, but I am going to show some of them:

This section is called “Play and Explore” and  it includes some games in which it is possible to interact with the characters of the book by assembling puzzles, guessing the footprints of the animals, etc. It is very useful cause we can use it before, during and after reading. If we start doing this kind of activities before reading the book, our students can have a general idea about the story. We can also play during, since we can intrigue our students and after, to review what we have read.

Furthermore, this website has some news, not also about The Gruffalo, but about some other books of this charming author. This kind of news can inspire teachers to create similar activities with the students.

Moreover, it contains a rich variety of resources, but not just for students because we have a specific section only for teachers. It also includes an area in which it is possible to sing the songs with Julia Donaldson.

Finally, I would like to say that there are plenty of activities in this website that can be very useful for teachers and students. If we use them correctly in classrooms, our students can develop a lot of competences and intelligences, such as the spatial by assembling puzzles, the musical by singing the songs or the linguistic one, by reading.

I hope you visit this website! I am going to let you the link of the “The Gruffalo’s film” in case you want to watch it:

http://cinefox.tv/ver2666/the-gruffalo_pelicula-completa.html

(This is the only free web I found to watch the film and it has spanish subtitles). I recommend you!!

On one hand, Raquel, our teacher, began asking us for some finger plays. Everybody looked at each other because we didn’t know exactly what was she talking about, so she finally explained us that finger plays were the plays our partners used to play with us by taking hands as a game. They could be just a play or also could be a play mixed with a song.

Then, we realized about what Raquel was dealing to, so we were telling her some examples that we all reminded of our childhood. These were “5 lobitos”, “Un elefante se balanceaba”, “Este fue a por leña”, etc. After that, Raquel was introducing us some examples from the English children literature: “This little piggy went to the market”, “Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear”, “Two little dicky birds”, “One, two, three, four, five”, “Incy Wincy Spider” and “Five little ducks”. This kind of literature is very fun and useful.

In future, when we were teaching english literature to our students we can introduce them these examples in order to make them aware of the wealthy variety of infant literature not only here in Spain but in England and in other countries as well. We can use them as an original  tool in class or, if anybody ends up teaching on Infant Education that person may be able to use them with the youngest children.

On the second hand, Raquel introduced us another kind of children literature in English. These one were Jazz chants.

At the beginning, Raquel played a video in which Carolyn Graham explained us how she created Jazz Chants. She said that Jazz Chants are composed by a coherent set of syllables together by following a simple rhythm.

If we want to create a Jazz Chant we only need to follow some basic rules: To use real and useful language and to be conscious that this one is appropriated to the age of the children we want to apply it. So, how can we use Jazz Chants to 4 years old children?

If we want to focus on 4 years old children we can use any content they were studying at school and create a rhythm for it. One of the examples Carolyn showed us was to use sentences such as “Have a nice weekend!” and “thanks, you too!” We can use these ones in order to show our pupils respect behaviours in our society. Using just two beats this specific Jazz Chant would sound like this:

• Haveanice weekend! (2 beats)
• Thanks, youtoo! (2 beats)

Moreover, Raquel gave us the opportunity to make up one Jazz Chant per group, so we could put in Carolyn Graham’s shoes and try this at least once. Because of that, we noticed that it’s very important the creativity, the objective why you are doing that and having fun with your pupils. If you want you can accompany the Jazz Chant with a specific choreography. It even would be more catchy for children.

In my opinion, I think both resources are useful and appropriate for children. Maybe it seems that finger plays are more appropriate for the youngest children than Jazz Chants but using creativity we can adapt them to everybody.

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