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.

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.

Last year I made one for my little cousin it was handmade, I think it was a very good present for him because he could always read his story and he will enjoy it because I make it using different textures and now that he is a little bit older he can touch it and see it as many times he want. In my opinion this kind of books are a very good resource because the child feel involve in the story and he pays more attention to it because he is the one who is living the adventures or that he is involved in the weft we could let him some blank pages to continue it by himself and make their imagination and creativity work.

In relation to this types of books other kind are the ones with pops ups like this one:
They were fantastic because as the same time that you were reading you could see what was happening in a 3D dimension and there were other books in which there were secrets and you have to find them and you could play with the pop ups it was so funny.

There are plenty of books of this kind but the best ones are the ones we made telling our own stories I tend to think that because you can invent your own story including your own drawings and that gives the book a lot of personality. There isn´t a perfect formula to write a book we just have to let our imagination fly, start writing words and scrawls to make the first ideas come out and then put them into an order then things everything will fall into its place.

Personally, I feel strongly that we should encourage our students to write books, poems and little stories to make their imagination blow, and be more creative besides there are going to became richer, because they will learn more vocabulary and they will express themselves better.

Finally I would like to talk about interactive books, this type of books are popular know because it’s been more common to have tablets and electronic devices at home for the use of the smallest of the house and are a very good resource to read them stories but we have to read stories as well to variety of books that children read.

I will like to know your opinion about this, and if you have ever had the chance to have a personalized book. Thanks for ridding and I hope you like it.

On Monday, our teacher prepared new activities for us that were linked with poetry. The first activity that we did had a close relation with new technologies. In this activity, first we were divided in small groups of four or three people, then we had to search on YouTube for the poetry videos that we did and choose one of them.
They can be watched in this direction: (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdrzI70O2odaLe7LN52gX7Q)

After choosing, we had to create a QR code for the video that we had chosen using the website: https://www.the-qrcode-generator.com/. Once we had the QR code ready; we started to think about an activity that can be done with the video that we have chosen, such as adding a new strophe or drawing objects that appear or should appear in the poetry, etc. You may think about the purpose of this activity; the aim of the activity was to print the QR codes with the activities suggested and place them in the corridors of the university, so that people could do the activities that we created thanks to their smartphone´s camera.

By the time we finished the activity we started with the next one which was linked with creation, art and visual spatial intelligence. The activity began when the teacher place in different parts of the class some sheets with a poetry in them, but this poetries had a special characteristic; its verses form shapes of objects that were related with them. We had to go read each sheet and create another example using the technique which appears in the sheet.

In conclusion, I have to say that I really liked the activities that we did, because they gave the opportunity to develop imagination and creativity, also they were motivational for us and they would be motivational for children as well, but a very interesting point that the activities suggested is the sense of continuity, I mean that the videos that we did some weeks ago have been used again for another activity. Furthermore, I think that this could be used in some many ways in schools for letting the children create a visible progression in the continuity of the activities that they do.

But maybe, to create a character is not as easy as it seems, we should follow some steps to have clear the idea and to produce a complete character with more than one face and multidimensional instead of creating a simple one.

But, how do we bring a character to life?

1. Pick a gender and give it a name. It can be male or female. You can give it a common or an unusual name but remember that the fact that the name isn’t original doesn’t mean it’s boring.

2. Choose what your character is going to be. You can find many fantasy creatures in fairytales from ogres to speakers’ objects. Now it’s time for you to pick yours from the different categories: elder, hero, true love, villain, helper, friend, messenger, the girl.

3. Select a period of time. The character can be a time traveler or it can live in the Middle Ages, in the future, in other planet, with the Ancient Egypt, in the Roman Empire, at present or in any other time of the history. Watch out! The followings steps have to be connected with the period of time you have chosen.

4. Choose a personality. Describe it just with 3 adjectives, the most important ones and after that develop and elaborate the personality more. Remember that you also have to define the age of your character or at least if it is a child, a teenager, an adult or an elder. Normally, the characters that we like the most are those who are not perfect and in consequence those who have a weak spot or a dark side. You can think about its origins and explain why it is like that or why it has a particular nature. It is also important to describe and to explain how it interacts with other characters of the story.

5. Give it an appearance. If not the character will be almost nonexistence. You have to describe it physically, the color of the eyes, the hair, the height, the weight, the clothes and any strange or shocking physical characteristic.

6. Likes and dislikes. Think about the hobbies and activities of your character, things that it likes to do or not. It can be anything, from physical activities to cultural and intellectual activities. The possibilities are endless.

7. Character evolution. Usually every character changes along the story according to the adventures and situations that it has to live. Your character has a determined personality at the beginning of the story but you have to think where and how your character is going to end and what its objective is. Is it a good guy who turns to the bad side or the opposite? Has it a hidden power or trauma that is going to come to light? Is it going to achieve its goal? Many things can happen while you are writing but I recommend you to think how your character is going to end.

Your character can be inspired on you or in other person, can be your antagonist or it can be completely imaginary. Now your character is ready to play in the story and to interact with others!

Thank you very much for reading me and I hope these seven tips can help you in the creations of your own fairytale character.

Most of the presented authors work not only in telling stories the also produce they books and draw them and they created  very good books, most of the books where attractive for the children because the story was closer to the children, and others have a moral inside, which could help readers to solve problems and learnt from them. This is the reason why some of these books are so famous and so well sold. Also we don’t have to forget that the drawings are so important because if the book has good drawings and it is related with the story it’s going to be easier for the children to read the book.

I didn’t know most of the authors but some others I recognised because of its famous books as Roald Dhal wit Matilda and Charlie and the chocolate factory, and other authors of whom I see the films based on their books as E. B. White with Stuart little, or even the series as in the case of Marc Brown with Arthur, and many others. Knowing which were the motivations of the authors to write those incredible stories was interesting besides.

I decided to talked about this because in a no longer future we will have the task of encourage our children to read and it’s not going to be easier decide which book is going to be better for them and which on is going to be more interested for them so probably we will wake up something inside us that inspire us to create a book for our students, who knows…

Here I let you a website in which you could find different tools to create books for our future students or even to make them create their own stories, moreover it is also explained what every tool it’s for.

• http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/Writing+Tools

This other website is a blog in which its author shows 5 website that create books with video, that’s seems fantastic to create personalized books.

• http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2011/08/5-free-tools-for-creating-video-book.html#.VEqJwiKsWSp

This type of website are a good resource to create books and help our students develop their imagination and their creativity, I hope you like this post and you find it useful. I want to know your opinion. Thanks for reading.

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.