As you know, today we have been filling a kind of questionnaire related to the bilingual program in which we are learning in the CUCC. For that reason I want to share some of my opinions and reflections about it.

I have to say that I’m really glad of choosing the bilingual program. I think it is a decision I will never regret for several reasons. The first one can be how much I have improve my English along these four years, of course, I have to work a lot with my English yet. But I would say that my fluency, my ability to communicate, my listening, my vocabulary, my grammar… everything it is a bit better. I think this is very important because when we were in school or high school, they were more focused on teaching us grammar or writing but we worked very little the speaking, communicative activities. I can remember just a few activities in which we worked these aspects.

Another reason why I would choose this program again is because of the CLIL approach. I think this approach was new for most of us and I consider it is a good way to make us understand how it works by learning with it as we have been doing. I realized we were learning with CLIL when we were in second year and we talked about the characteristics of this approach. For me CLIL, well applied and put it into practice in the correct way, is the best way of learning. Students are more involved, the learning process is more meaningful for them due to that integrate culture, they participate in a more active way, they feel like they really are the protagonists, they should feel more comfortable and confident because the multiple intelligences are taken into account and for that reason each student will have its moment. These are just some of the positive things that in my opinion CLIL includes.

Besides, eventhough at the beginning we were a bit worried because we thought we were going to learn less contents than the other groups, we have realized that we have learnt or improve something more important, that are our abilities and capacities.

For all these reasons, I think if I would have to choose again I will choose the same program.

Today I want to talk about today’s half group class. During the first hour, we have been working with the poetry videos our classmates did. We have been creating activities we could do with those videos. After that, we generated a GQ code with the video and the activity related to it, because we are going to challenge the rest of the students of other classes to do it. I really think this is a very good idea because I like doing things that are going to be useful or put it into practice, in this case with our college mates. Another thing I like about this activity is that we are going to have the chance to check if our mates did the activity, because we put a couple of hashtags which are #Soy CUCC and #helpingAnnieOnlight to see their answers. This activity is going to be carried out next week, I’m so eager to see what happens.

Related to using the GQ code to do these kinds of activities I realized that we have found it a bit difficult to create. In fact it is something really simple and easy, but we are not used to do it, and this make me think that we as teacher have to be always alert of new things and in this case, new technologies, because this world is continuing progressing and we can’t be stuck in what we learnt. Children and children’s necessities changes through time and we have to adapt ourselves and our way of giving classes to the time in which we are living.

The second part of the class, consisted on created our own poems following a technique or a kind of poem. In my case it was the “shape poem”. We decided to do a beach and all the things related to it like sand, sun, fishes, ball… In my opinion this is a really good method to make students feel more attracted to poetry due to that is more catchy and visual, for that reason students can feel more motivated to read and produce poetry, something I consider very positive.

That is all for today! have a great week

As you know, we are going to have the visit of some students of fourth of primary in our college. This is so excited. Now we are students in our senior year, we all have worked and prepared activities for a group of students, but in my opinion this is something new, because we are going to have the chance to work with our classmates, as we have been doing during this four years, but with one difference. This time we are going to have the chance to put it into practice, and this is so important for several reasons.

Sometimes I have the feeling that we are doing incredible works, in many subjects. But then, we don’t do anything apart from the presentation with them. Of course, I’m not saying this is something bad cause we can´t put it into practice always as we are going to do this time. I know these activities are part of our training and we can always use them in the future, but it is true that I think that it would be wonderful if we have had the chance of doing this more times, because is the final proof, to see if what we are doing can work or not, what kind of things we need to improve, adapt, change or modify.

I have to say that at the beginning when this activity was proposed to us I was thinking, “This is very complicated and it’s going to take a lot of time to prepare it”. Now, I still thinking the same, it takes a lot of organization and coordination between all the groups but watching the planning, how is all organized, and the ideas we all have had. I think we are going to do an incredible work. Of course, is going to take a lot of time, work, reflection, preparation, effort from us. But I think we are really motivated and when we have started working and thinking about what things we can do, we became really excited and we want to do our best to impress those students.

I can’t wait to start working on this to see all the activities we are going to prepare and to receive the children. I’m sure we all are going to do an incredible work that we all will enjoy, children and “almost teachers”.

Welcome to my third post. Today I want to talk about the class we had related with tales, more specifically with “Cinderella”.

Most of us know the story because we have seen the sweet version of Disney. But the truth is that the original versions are not that sweet and for that reason the target of this story it wasn´t for children in a first place but for members of the high society.

In my opinion, it is really interesting to see how different versions appeared in different times and places and apparently, they didn’t know about the existence of the other story or version. From my point of view this is a bit strange, and I wonder how can this be possible, maybe it is just a coincidence, but there are some specific things they have in common that made me been really suspicious about it. For example, in both versions, Grimm’ and Perrault’, the mother of Cinderella dies, the father get married for a second time, Cinderella has two stepsisters that treat her badly, the Prince looks for a Queen and celebrates a ball or festival, Cinderella forget the slipper and so on. I don’t know about you but I think this is too much to just be a coincidence.

Anyway, I can’t say they were copying ideas but that’s what it seems to me. With this, I don’t mean to say this is something bad, they are just different versions, the same happens with the movies. There are a lot of films that have been versioned by different directors and each of them changes something, because they evolve with the pass of the time; ideas, thoughts, beliefs… changes with the society and I think movies are a good way of reflect them.

Finally, I want to add that we have to be very careful with the things we take to class. In the case of the tales, sometimes we are not aware of some messages that can be transmited. Sometimes we are focusing on something that much that we can’t see in an objective way and this is something that we can’t allow to ourselves as future teachers.

Today I am going to talk about the first seminar we had last Monday. During this session we have been talking in pairs about some of our experiences with books, things like our first memories when we weren’t able to read yet, which was our favorite book when we were children or which is the book or the books that have influenced our lives. After talking about this with our pair, we share this personal information with the rest of the classmates. I have to say that I really loved this sharing part, I think you can know a lot of things about a person by knowing what he or she reads or if he or she likes to read or not.

One thing I realized is that, some of us, agreed in one part of our experience. We didn´t like reading in school or high-school cause we had this feeling of doing it cause you had to make a summary and just because you had to read at least an specific number of books. I think this is terrible; of course it is very important for children to read but we can´t just pick a book and forced them to read it and expect they like it. We must look for books close to them; find something which they can feel identified with and try to avoid summaries or things like that cause in my opinion that it’s when we start thinking that reading is homework and for that reason we don’t enjoy doing it.

Finally, I have to say I loved this session because it made me reflect a lot about my experiences reading during my whole life. I have never thought about it but the truth is that books have influenced my life more than I thought. I have noticed this, because I have been doing my reading map, that we will be presenting in class next Tuesday, and I have realized how much have change my tastes when I’m going to pick a book of the library now.

I invite everyone to stop for a moment and start reflecting a bit about your own personal experiences reading.

I really enjoyed watching those videos; I think it was really funny for me and the rest of my classmates. We were really engaged with the stories and we couldn’t stop looking at that expressive face of Michael Rosen. In that moment I thought, “everyone loves this”, so if we, as adults, love that imagine children! I would be interested in the story even though I couldn’t understand a word of English, and in my opinion that’s really important, cause I realized that of course, share a language is important for having communication, but you can share and speak the same language but maybe you can´t transmit as much as Michael Rosen in one of his stories.

For that reason, I believe that storytelling is directly linked with literacy, (another topic we have been working with during the first week) cause not everything is the spoken language in communication. As we can see in Michael Rosen’s videos, he is using all the time gestures, using his arms, hands… and also the face, this is very important, because I think we all recognize a happy, sad, frustrated, worried… face when we watch it and this is also communication.

Apart from this, I have to add that the rhythm, musicality, the tone and volume of the voice and other facts also helps with the understanding of the story; it makes it less monotone and more attractive for children but also for adults. Also it is important the repetition of structures, words, sounds… these repetitions makes the story catchier and the proof of that is that when the video of the Bear Hunt finished, we were singing or murmuring all the time “we are going on a bear hunt, we are gonna catch a big one…”

Finally I would like to share the link of the video about the Bear Hunt in case you want to feel like Michael Rosen telling a story, hope you find it as funny as me.

http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/videos.html#bear

Video from http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/

During this course we will have the subject “Exploring Children’s Literature in English”. We are working with a lot of interesting things, for that reason I think this blog is a good opportunity to share all of them with you.

Hope you find it useful and interesting!