This reminds me to the first lesson of this subject. The summer had just finished, another year began (last year in the university). It was the beginning of the end. That moment seems so near and jet so far to me. We started that class in a similar way that some people begin their daily life, with a song. A song with a strong and deep message. This melody has sound in my mind during these last weeks (like a mantra) and has given and gives me strength to work hard every day.  It was a fantastic idea to present the subject with that song that gave us so much important ideas in just 3 minutes.

Can you remember that moment? Surely, this video refreshes your memory.

At first sight, through that song, we could deduce that along the subject we were going to have fun while learning new important contents. Secondly, and as a consequence of the first idea, we could have an approach about what the subject was going to deal with, that is children literature elements such as songs, poetry, theatre… Sometimes, the best way to introduce new contents is not based on talk about it, but to show examples.

And I feel alright, and we’ll feel alright 
Cause we’ll work it out, yeah we’ll work it out 

Furthermore, the song transmitted us, that we should work hard, but the teacher was going to be with us, during the whole learning process, that we should not feel alone. There would be someone who wanted to encourage and to support us. This idea can be applied  also to these last years. Surely, all of us have a special person who supported him during the best and worst moments.

I’ll be your light, your match, your burning sun 
I’ll be the bright, in black, that’s making you run
I’ll be your ghost, your game, your stadium
I’ll be your fifty thousand clapping like one 

Finally, we, as future teachers, should understand the song message as a philosophy of education. Apart from the best methodologies, resources, materials… we need something much more important, vocation. We should work really hard on this till the love runs out.

I’ll be doing this, if you ever doubt
Till the love runs out, ’til the love runs out

“Love Runs Out” Lyrics

As you can see, this song it quite significant for me. I would love to know your opinion in this topic: Did you feel the same in that lesson? Are there other important songs about your learning experience? Which ones? Which would be your BSO of this moment/subject/term/degree?

The more, the better

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.  

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.

To contribute to this aim, I want to present you through this post, another way to enjoy with literature. I am referring to micro stories, also known as micro tales, micro fiction, flash fiction… In order to have a more clear idea about micro stories, it is useful to read some definitions about this term. For instance, Mac Millan Dictionary website defines them as “a style of literature in which stories are extremely short and often consist of less than 300 words”. Meanwhile, MicroStory website explains that “a MicroStory has no limits but length. A MicroStory must be 499 words or less. That is all”.

First image

Nevertheless, this is not something new for us. During the first year, in the subject Desarrollo de las Habilidades Comunicativas, the teacher taught us micro tales, concretely, he talked about a school where students wrote their own micro tales. He told us a Spanish micro tale that a girl of primary education created:

I do not exactly the reason why that moment was amazing for me. Maybe it is true that the best perfumes come in small bottles. Since that moment I understood, that micro tales could be a great and innovative tool to develop literature activities with our students.

In this sense, it is really interesting the lesson plan that Brown and Schulten (2013) propose to read and to write micro stories with students. An example could be the warm-up activity, where the teacher has to write in the blackboard the following micro tale, attributed to Ernest Hemingway:

Then, the teacher asks them to consider whether or not they think it is a story. Once students have had time to reflect on it, they can discuss with their peers about it.
Another great possibility to work micro tales is Twitter, where students can create their own flash fiction. Due to the fact that on Twitter, we have a limited number of characters to write each tweet, it is quite easy to develop good micro stories. A great model is @themicrostories.
Finally, I would like to stand out The tiny book of tiny stories, a book created throughout the collaboration of many flash fiction authors. Right after, there are some micro stories belonging to the book.

Second image

Third image

If you are interested in micro tales I recommend you to research the following websites and articles.

http://www.microstory.com/definition.php

https://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/epstein_5_15_11/

https://goldbot.wordpress.com/category/prose-2/micro-tales/

http://www.sixwordstories.net/

https://twitter.com/microcuentos

http://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/13/the-tiny-book-of-tiny-stories/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLQAqAhrDPY

Brown, A. and Schulten, K. (2013). Short and Sweet: reading and writing flash fiction. Retrieved from http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/short-and-sweet-reading-and-writing-flash-fiction/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

First image from http://www.tericrosschetwood.com/why-i-hate-flash-fiction/

Second and third images from http://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/13/the-tiny-book-of-tiny-stories/

In any case, it could be possible to deal with some improvements. On the one hand, I would have like to know and to present authors in a closer way. For instance, It would be fantastic to talk about them in a reading circle. On the  other hand, time was too short, so we could just talk about general ideas.

Due to these facts, I consider interesting to add some ideas about the author (Roald Dahl) that I was investigating with my partners Carmen Rojo and Loli Casco.

It was great to know about the considerable contribution that he made to children’s literature. Even nowadays, his legacy persists in an active and collaborative way. This is possible thanks to Roald Dahl Museum that works really hard to make possible that children can be closed and engaged to Roald Dahl’s life and books through many different, creative and active activities that are celebrated in the Museum. According to the Official Website, the museum presents three main galleries:

• Boy gallery. It is about Roald Dahl’s childhood, his love of chocolate and his schoolboy pranks (children’s jokes).
• Solo gallery. It is related to his journey to Africa. Visitors can appreciate  how Roald Dahl’s real-life adventures led him to become a writer. They can experience the atmosphere of Roald Dahl’s original Writing Hut (small and isolated house, a kind of shelter).
• The story centre. This is the Museum’s creative hub where the displays will inspire visitors own writing and story-making. They can listen to top tips from their favorite authors, make a stop-frame animation, sit in a replica of Roald Dahl’s writing chair.

Considering that it is difficult to visit the museum, it is interesting to have a look to the museum galleries through the Virtual Museum Tour.

I would like to end up this post with an inspiring quote of this exceptional author:

“You must be a perfectionist. That means you must never be satisfied with what you have written until you have rewritten it again and again, making it as good as you possibly can”.

First image: Roald Dahl’s writing hut

Second image: Replica of Roald Dahl´s writing hut

Third image: Replica of Roald Dahl’s writing chair

First image from http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/14902536

Second and third images from http://www.roalddahl.com/

• Our personal point of view

One of the first points of the topic The discovery of Children´s literature was the definition of literacy. To work on it, the teacher encouraged us to try to think about that meaningful term individually.  Then, in small groups, we had to put in common our ideas and later we shared all the definitions as a whole group. As a final result, we all realized about literacy was more than developing writing and reading skills.

• Subject’s definition of literacy

Once in that point, the teacher proposed us a really complete and detailed definition of literacy, which gathered all that academic and educational abilities that characterize it, such as  reading and writing in an appropriate way or communicating with others with a share code.  We also learnt about its dimensions: phonics (sounds and spelling), grammatical knowledge, word recognition and graphic knowledge, knowledge of the context and critical thinking.

• Going further

After that lesson, my perception about this concept changed totally. At the moment, I have a wider understanding about the learning of reading and writing. It is not just the base of learning that allows the study of other subjects. The development of that skills enables the human being grow, its lifelong learning and its independence and participation with the people. Besides, it does not just benefits to individuals, it also contributes to the improvement of societies and countries. Especially, it is able to expand the  social, cultural and economic dimensions of a nation and consequently it  facilitates its globalization and connection with the whole world.

Taking into account all of these ideas, we must be aware of the great magnitude that literacy has for the education of children. In that sense, it is also necessary to appreciate the relevant role that we can carry out as future teachers of primary education.

An organism that deals with this topic in detailed is UNESCO, who studies literacy as a  crucial component for the human being development and describes it as a fundamental human right. If you feel engage with this topic, I recommend you to visit UNESCO official website where you can have access to the definition of literacy that they propose and also to some extra documents related to programs that try to  guarantee the literacy acquisition in childhood.

I hope you feel engaged with this topic and I invite you to comment on this post to share new ideas.

This year, I am coursing the subject “Exploring Children’s Literature” lectured by Prof. Dr. Raquel Fernández. I will try to participate in this blog through posts that be in relation with the contents and activities of the subject.

Hope you like it!