At the beginning of the year our teacher made us watch a video clip of One Republic, which is called “Love runs out”. I remember that time, our expectations about how the subject would be and that great moment in where we got astonish by listening that awesome song. That was why that song was the kind of songs that caused our hair stand one end, due to its meaningful lyric and the sense it gave to us.  Raquel played that one because it talked about the feelings you have when you are much closed to reach what you want, so we could feel very much identified.

Then, Raquel has been reinforcing these feelings during the year by teaching us a huge variety of useful activities and techniques that we could apply to our future pupils or, in my case, also to my daughter. In no more than three months we have learnt some nursery rhymes; jazz chants; jolly phonics; we have created beautiful reading maps; we also have learnt how to perform stories telling; how to design our future library classroom; how to get the most of an infant movie to teach some contents; we have known several great authors, etc. We had fun, not only in class but preparing the projects and I think we also had reflected carefully on our capability of being great teachers.

Lastly, in my opinion, thanks to this type of subject, we all are now prepared to face that sweet future that is waiting for us.  I don’t want to be the teacher’s pet but I will always take into account this subject as a reference in classrooms. I had the great opportunity to try the results of how everything worked at class but also at my home and the smiles they could provoke would be priceless.

Here you are a photo I took a month ago. It is my daughter enjoying one of the Michael Rosen’s stories :).

In this post I am going to talk about the activity we carried out the last Monday at class. This one was related to a previous one in which we had to learn by heart one specific poem and then record ourselves by performing it. Therefore, the activity we did at class was an enjoyable way of putting into practice “how to recycle previous activities”.

To begin with, the teacher asked us to look for the video we recorded the previous time in internet. Then, we had to choose one of the videos our classmates produced in order to start working on and finally, we had to design one task related to that video in order to make students participate by interacting with the video.

The poem we selected talked about anything that you can collect anywhere. Because of that, we designed an activity in which children had to create three different verses about anything that they can collect anywhere and add them to the poem. This way they have a clear grammar scaffolding, but also they can use their imagination and to feel themselves as great poets.

In my opinion, these type of activities are very creative and fun for children. You can forget about teaching them poetry only by introducing them well known writers or make them learning by heart one specific poem and recite it in front of the class. These type of strategies are a little bit strict and bored. With these last you don’t offer them the opportunity of make them reflect on  what writers are inspired of when they create, or what kind of feeling they usually manage at the end, when they publish poems. However, if you sometimes make them put in some poet shoes and ask them to create something new, a current adaptation of a Becquer poem or to stick images around a poem in order to provide a visual support of what they understand, they can realize of the great work a “simple” poem takes and the meaning it could has for them, then for humanity. Moreover, it is recycled, so you can get the most of previous tasks to realise new ones. You have not to think too much.

Lastly, our future pupils are mainly children. They don’t understand about learning by heart or reciting but they know how to play, so why don’t let them play? The use of these type of strategies could mean a different and a better way of learning in which children could explore, evaluate their possibilities and create something fresh.

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.

This post is related with the class in which we were talking about tales and how they were changing during time depending on the author it belonged to.

The first impressions I had when I discovered the three versions of the Cinderella story were astonishment and surprising. I supposed that Walt Disney had to create Cinderella by taking the story from other different origin but I never imagined how much cruelty there could be in this kindly and romantic tale as in the Grimm’s version.

Because of that, my curiosity made me looking for other well known instances and their mysterious origins and finally, as a result, I found the name of Karlheinz Bartel and his research about the real case of Maria Sophia Margaretha Catharina von Erthal.

Karlheinz Bartel was a german historian of the last century who had in mind to find out where Walt Diney’s stories come from.  Because of that, he took a look in Brothers Grimm’s tales because both artists shared some of the stories.

Finally, he moved around the german history, in where he found the noble name of Maria Sophia Margaretha Catharina von Erthal.

Does she rings you a bell?

 Maria Sophia Margaretha Catharina von Erthal

Snow White (Disney’s character)

To begin with, this woman was born on 15th of June of 1729 in a german city called Lohr. She was the unique daughter of one noble couple in Germany.  When she was 12 her father married again with Claudia Elisabeth Maria von Venningen, two years after of the death of Maria Sophia’s mother.

Maria Sophia really didn’t get on well with her stepmother but that relationship was not so horrible. It was believed that the stepmother felt jealous of Maria Sophia because of her behaviour who was known in the town due to her goodness with people and her charity to the needy.

Appart from that, the stepmother had in her power a “magic mirror” that was given to her by her husband in her wedding. That kind of mirror was fashioned in that time because was able to repeat what you said. That’s because of its reverberation skill. One curiosity is that on the mirror left side you can read: “Amour propre” (self- love).

The “magic” mirror

A present gifted to Maria Sophia’s stepmother.

The mirror that appears in Snow White movie.

Besides, Lohr, the city is located in a mining zone, in where there were children working at mines to find some silver and copper. It was said that Maria Sophia used to join them to feed them and play.

And now… Is this familiar for you? Of course!. Brothers Grimm, who lived a few time after inspired by her to create the original tale of Snow white and also Walt Disney fall in love with her story. That’s why today we can watch her beauty on an amazing film, but also the chaterbox mirror and the 7 great friendly dwarfs.

If you are interested on reading the Grimm’s version of Snow White I let you to take a look on the link below and if some time you travel to Germany you can visit the Spessart museum, in the old castle of Lohr. In there you can inmerse into the most lovely tale ever.

• http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm053.html (Grimm’s version of Snow White)

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.

I really enjoyed the lesson about Jolly Phonics. I thought learning them through dances and songs is a very fun way to make our future students realize about the main important pronunciation of some words. Nevertheless, I noticed that, in my opinion, the phonemes you can show through those songs are not enough to make our future students understand the relation between which word or image belongs to which sign, so I began to wonder how I would teach Jolly Phonics to people who is not as good at it as others. Maybe they need more examples or images to relation sounds with words that they are owned.

For this reason I began to look for some information in the web page “Synthetic Phonics” and I found a video called “The Power of Synthetic Phonics to Teach English, by Debbie Hepplewhite”.

That video is about trying to demonstrate the power of Synthetic Phonics on a foreign language by using the early year’s starter package. This means trying how works this method, which consists on teaching reading through being taught the correspondences between phonemes and letters, so, finally, students can identify and blend different letter sounds and combinations together, in order to create a word or to spell new words they only can hear.

Debbie Hepplewhite, who is the teacher that introduces us the method, shows us a very good way to teach children’s first stages the different phonics.

Firstly, she introduces us the first phonemes setting a pre- school child is taught, which are a set of 12 different phonemes.

Secondly, she expounds us a set of suitable cards, which are form by the phoneme, a keyword that involves perfectly the phoneme; an image to get a visual remain of the word, and a set of different words that also contains the phoneme inside their structure.

In that moment, she starts to show us how a class would be taught by using those resources, but also highlighting the importance of modeling every sound she is introducing children and the importance of continuing the process in order to get the most of the students learning.

Finally, she presents us an activity book, which is full of sheets of those resources, in order to make students build their own learning process.

In my opinion, I consider those resources are also very appropriate for children in pre-school because you start working modeling with them since the more basic knowledge and they continue creating their own learning until being expert on distinguish the different non mother tongue phonemes just with hearing a word.

Thank you for your attention!

Here you are the video “The Power of Synthetic Phonics to Teach English, by Debbie Hepplewhite”:

As one of my subjects is “Exploring Children’s Literature in English” I’m going to participate as much as possible on this blog, which is aimed to comment on the different topics we see at our class and to inform you about some reports or atractive researches that are relationed with the subject.

Hope you to enjoy! Best regards