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 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.

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.

Is the first time that we have the chance to work with pupils in the university, we sometimes see other groups of mates working with pupils and I have to say that I felt a little bit jealous but now we are the ones that have this challenge.

In class we were deciding which film we were going to deal with and we have had very good options as “The lord of the rings”, “The book of the jungle”, “Mary Poppins”, “Aladdin” and others. So we have to vote the ones that we liked the most and the thing was so equal between “the book of the jungle” and “Aladdin” however “Aladdin” wins. At first sight was a little bit difficult to find the didactic porpoise of this film but as the time goes by every group was thinking on the different things we could teach with this incredible film. After that we presented our topics to the rest of the mates and they told as some advices about where to place the different groups and also other topics that we can relate with the one we have chosen.

Moreover I didn´t remember the film very well so that day in the afternoon I was watching the film to see all the scenes and how funny the Gini was, the next day in my group we were all singing the songs that are displayed in the film, how anybody can remember the songs that well, but my mates did it; now I´m all the time singing it.

I would never imagine doing this at the university, but in my opinion is a very good way to practice for our future jobs, and also for being more prepared and being more involved in the task. I´m so enthusiastic, I count the days to do it and to see all of as dress up like all the characters in the film and also how you we all decorate the university. I hope you are also enjoying with this task. I would like to know what do you think about it and how do you feel?

Do you think we could adapt Disney films to explain science and other subjects to our students?

Today we, Azu Rodríguez and alicia.lopez, would like to share with you an experience that we carried out two days ago, which we consider could be useful for you (especially for those of you who could not come to our lesson). Although for some people it might sound a little bit strange, we included some contents of this wonderful subject, Exploring Children’s Literature in English, into an amazing lesson of the Physical Education subject. Yes! You read it right! Literature and Physical Education were together in one lesson.

Everything came up due to the fact that we had to design a Physical education lesson as a main project for the subject with the same name. Although from the beginning we wanted to give a cross-curricular nuance to our project, initially the contents/topics that we had in mind were reduced to Corporal expression (content of P.E.) and Animals (content of Science). However in the end, we could get a lot more from it, including other science contents and contents of this subject such as: Storytelling, Drama and something similar to Jazz Chants. This is going to be much clearer for you once we have explained you some of the activities.

Firstly, we developed an activity called Photographers. It consisted on the representation of a photograph (of any topic) by the students, who were divided in different groups. The task is based on two different stages: In the first one, while the music is on, a group of students is preparing the photograph, and the rest of classmates are back towards the small group at the same time that they are dancing around them. Then, when the music stops, the small group should statically maintain their position, in order to imitate a photograph. Finally, the rest of the class has to guess what the topic of the photograph is. For helping students to guess the topic of each photograph, we provided them with some grammar structures and sentences that were really useful to express their hypothesis and opinions correctly.

We consider that it was completely linked with the fact of using Drama in Content CLIL lessons, which is something that although we haven’t seen it yet, we will do it in a few lessons.

Photographers: grammar structures

Secondly, we continued with Storytellers. This task is composed by two phases. During the first one, the teacher acts as a narrator who tells the pupils a short story, and at the same time, they have to mimic what he or she is telling them. Along the second phase, students are divided in small groups. In each group, one of the students is the narrator and the other ones represent the story through gestures. Finally, each group shows to the rest of the class their own stories. In order to help them to create the story, we gave them a written frame or template with the general structure of the story.

Storytellers: template

Thirdly, another activity was the one named The Continental Drift. In the beginning we were just looking for a video of a dance, when we stumbled across a video that exceeded our expectations. It did not include just a dance (which was somehow related with the previous topic of the animals, apart from another content of the Science content: the movements of tectonic plates) but also contained a great song which lyrics allowed us to work both, vocabulary movements (move, jump, step, crisscross…) as well as grammar structures (how to give orders). Here you can see the lyrics of the song, and a little bit below we have attached the link of the video in case you want to take a look

The Continental Drift: song lyrics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMuJxd2Gpxo&list=PL0825A7D71881A668

On one hand, important and present components of our Lesson Plan were the Multiple Intelligences. Although, this is not a theory directly related with the subject Children’s Literature in English, we may suppose that it is something that can determine in some way the task engagement of students, in any subject including this one. Concretely, we focused in the following ones:

Musical (Musical Smart), Bodily-Kinesthetic (Body Smart), Interpersonal (Personal Smart) and Verbal-linguistic (Word Smart). The last one could be quite related with this subject.

To put in practice these intelligences (individually and combined) let students feel comfortable with the activities, that is, pupils can feel identified with some of these intelligences. The final result can be resumed as a much more effective and significant learning.

On the other hand, the cross-curricular concept that we have described along this post was not something completely new for us. Specially taking into account those links between in which one of the involved subjects was Children’s Literature in English. In fact, last year, through the subject Natural Science Didactics, we worked on similar activities, where we learnt contents singing and reading fairytales. For instance, we adapted Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Through that story, we tried to teach concepts related to measurements such as temperature (remember that Goldilocks tasted three different soup bowls) and length (Goldilocks took place in three different chairs). It was a creative and interesting activity and these resources can be really motivating for children.

Finally, although our lesson was designed for a concrete year of Primary, the material’s difficulty as well as the activities are easily adaptable. This is the reason why we mentioned at the beginning that it could be useful for you, because it can be applied in almost any year of primary.

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 :).

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.