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.

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.

Hi, Today I’m going to write a post about what we did during the middle group class on Monday. The topic of the class was poetry and the different ways to take advantage of it.

The class can be divided in different parts: In the first part, the teacher gave us some tables that we had to use in groups of three people. To complete the task, we had to open a PowerPoint file, where there was a picture of a map, and touch the different parts of a it which contained a link to a YouTube video. In the videos we heard some teachers speaking about how important are poetry and the diverse ways to approach it.

During the second part of the class, the teacher told us to form new groups of three people as well. Then, we did an activity similar to “the experts group” in which each group was given two websites that were highly linked with poetry. After that, we analyzed them and by the time we had finished we exchange our group partners and each of the new members of each group had to explain their website to the rest. We could use the tablets for this activity.

Finally for the last part of the lesson, we formed new groups of four people and the teacher gave us photocopies of some poetries. Each group had to choose one and then we had to put in practice our storytelling skills to develop choreographies for the poetry, so that children could use it and find poetry motivating and easy to follow. One we had everything planned we were recorded in video while we showed our poetry and its choreography.

In conclusion, this class was a very useful one; it is so because it was very complete. Thanks to it, we first learnt about poetry and how to use it in class; then some resources as websites were provided so that we can find some help, and finally we had the chance to practice what we had learnt during the lesson.

Moreover, the last thing I have to say is that although I like it so much due to the motivational part, I have to say that I would like to know other examples of activities that can be done with poetry at schools.

I hope this message proves interesting for those who like poetry!

The activity is called “Create your reading map”. It consists in creating a drawing by using your imagination in order to transmit an idea or a story.

In class, first we practice doing one in common. We represented the story of Cinderella; one by one we were adding steps to the story until we finished the whole story. Then the teacher proposed us to do another reading map, but it had to be done individually and the topic was “the evolution of reading in our lives”.

By the time we finished this activity we showed our drawings to the rest of the class and in pairs we discussed about their meaning and so on. Furthermore, I can say that I found this activity very useful for remembering how my reading skills and likes were changing through my life and the fact of doing it by this way made it much more interesting, so I wondered if this kind of activity can be used in other circumstances.

However, I´ve been thinking about it and the main points that involve this type of activity are: assessment, reviewing, cross-curricular and visual-spacial intelligence.

For instance, if teachers show this kind of activity to their pupils, and connect it with assessment and reviewing with an example, children may feel attracted with the idea of creating their own reading maps, so that, they can check their knowledge of the content in a more dynamic way. Nevertheless, if we think about multiple intelligences, this idea will be especially beneficial for those children whose visual-spacial intelligence is more developed and who prefer to study using a visual learning style.

In addition, to improve this activity, it would be easy to link it with other subjects apart from English, and make this activity a cross curricular one.

In a nutshell, as I’ve already said this activity can be used in an unlimited different ways, it also can be involve more than one subject as a cross curricular task and it can be helpful for children, mainly for those who prefer to study using a visual-spacial learning style.

I hope you liked my post and if anybody has a picture of his reading map, it would be grateful to paste it in your comments.

http://www.mindmapart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Space-Reading-Mind-Map.gif

Hello everyone, this week I’m writing about a new activity that we have developed during this week. We can call this activity as Groups of Experts in Children’s literature. To complete the activity, first we have to form small groups, and then the teacher gave to each group the name of a Children’s literature Author. After that, each group had to prepare a short display in which they explain who the authors were, what they did and why are they important.

My group had to work about Maurice Sendak. We learned the basic details of his life and work, such as the fact that he lived during the holocaust and the Lindbergh kidnapping case, due to those facts his works had a gloomy atmosphere. His most popular work is “Where the wild things are”, which has sold over 19 million copies and there is also a movie about the story.

After doing this group activity, I realized that this is the perfect activity that can be done with children, if we adapt the topic and the task of the activity for one that is related with any of the subjects that are taught at school, such as science. The reason why it can be so great is because it has lots of characteristics which make it ideal for children, for instance, it makes students work in groups, so that, they can develop a cooperative learning activity, in which they create their own knowledge. In addition, this activity is also highly related with CLIL because they can learn the content by using English as a tool for developing the content. Furthermore, this activity also makes students share what they have learnt to the rest of their peers and finally for making them feel more interested in the activity we can offer them the possibility to assess their classmates displays with a sheet of paper that can give feedback to the teacher and to their partners.

In conclusion, I can say that all these activities that we are doing during the different weeks, are not just for us to learn content about authors. Their main aim is to provide us with new and creative ideas that we may use in the future with our students. As a personal task, I will think about the different activities that we are doing in classes, which are also adaptable for children.

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

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