I have to be sincere and tell you that the first time I heard it I thought “that’s a joke and it can’t be true, how we can’t teach children how to write with pen and paper? Are the Finnish teachers crazy this morning?”.

Then I start thinking deeply about it and that it could be a reasonable option to change our methodology of learning how to write because we do almost everything with our “smart-devices”, so practically we don’t need to write in a paper. Also in schools, nowadays with the ICT in class we don’t need to spend lot of time making photocopies to class, we just find a webpage and the classroom projector do all the effort for us showing it to all the students, and to fill it, the students only have to stand up and touch with their finger the digital whiteboard and write the correct answer.

Finnish government said that they will make that change in September 2016 (for the 2016/2017 course). Maybe in Spain we need more time to apply it in a school. First of all, we need to apply at all the ICT in schools because not all the classes have one and not all the teachers know how to use it correctly, so first we need to improve this.

When we had done it, the next step could be the tablets for every child, so they can do their homework at home or in class in their tablet, so they don’t have to carry to class and go back home with a lot of books and notebooks, they only need their tablet!

Then, the third step could be the one the Finnish people will do in 2016: starting to teach children how to write in their tablets rather than in paper. Because they will use more those devices than paper at that year.

Apart from the children learning, we have to think that how much words do we write in a paper and how much do we write in our “smart-devices”. If you think on it, I’m sure that we spend more time writing in our smartphone or in our computer than writing in a paper. For example:

• We can write our grocery list in our Google Keep app rather than in a sticky note
• Create a mind map using the Evernote app rather than doing it a paper
• Talk to our cousin in France by the Skype app rather than sending him a letter
• Write a post to tell the world our thinking about something using a WordPress blog rather than publishing it in a newspaper

Do you imagine the next step of the education to implement the ICT in schools? Do you imagine a world without school bags? And without “physical” schools? We can imagine, but there is something that will never disappear: teachers.

The real name of this kind of books are “choose-your-own-adventure” and it was published between 1979 and 1998 by Bantam Books (now is part of Random House publisher house) selling more than 250 million of books in these 19 years.

The first (and the only one) book I had of that type I can read it around 10 times because each time I open it, I was sure that I would find a new story to read depending on what decisions I took in each page.

If you don’t know the kind of books I was speaking, I explain you: those books starts in the first page (as all the books) telling you the first sentences of a story, you have to read it until the book said to you that you have to choose between two options to follow the story: one option goes to one page, and the other option starts in another different one. So, at that moment, you have to choose the next step of the story. And that happens more times in the book, so you can choose the story you are going to read.

I have to confess that I really like those stories because you have to create the story without creating the characters or the environments, because the book gives it to you.

Those books are a good way to mix two different “worlds”: the literature and the “architecture”, because you have to create your own story based on something that someone has written, so it can be lots of stories inside one single book, so that’s amazing!

I will also recommend it to those children that, as me, didn’t like to read, because it seems as a normal book but it makes you think in order to decide which path will take the main character or to which place you want to go and why. The books are focused to readers between 12 and 16 years, but there are also specific books for children below 10.

To end up the post, I give you here a link to the Wikipedia article about those books where you can find the different books of that collection:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Choose_Your_Own_Adventure_books

The first thing I thought when I saw the headline was “I can’t believe that a gymnast like her tells her experiences about sport in two books. And even, if those books are for children”. So, I start to read the article and I see that she created a main character named “Olympia”, as a reference to the Olympic Games, so children, only reading the name of the character can discover what is her goal: reach the Olympic Games.

Using Olympia, Almudena told her story and how she became the best Spanish gymnast (she reached the finals of four Olympic Games: Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008) and gives tips about how to decorate the maillots, the make-up and the hair styles.

How we can use that books in our future classes?

That article made me think about how we can show our future students about healthy habits and promote sports in class. This kind of books are awesome for reach this objective because we have a story, specially adapted for children, with pictures, so they we can be focused only in the pictures if our students don’t have the reading skills learnt.

Also, that stories talks about other things rather than the main story. It’s like a “cross-curricular” book, because we have literature in the story and arts and crafts in the tips Almudena gives about her maillots.

One disadvantage and a great solution for that

One disadvantage of those books is that can be only focused on girls, because it can be a little bit strange (I don’t say impossible) to see a boy decorating a maillot or thinking about making-up, but we can adapt it to them!

For example, changing the name of the main character and giving our students the chance to create their own story about a gymnast. For example, while I was writing that I thought about a character named “Athos” (Yes, like the Musketeer, but can be a reference to Athens) who wants to be at the final of the swimming competition of the Olympic Games of Tokyo 2020, so he starts practising for it and reach, in 2015, the Spanish national championship, so his dream begins there. Can you imagine of creating a story like this at class?

A conclusion and a thought

Just to conclude, also, we can think about having in our class a meeting with the author of the book, Almudena Cid, and our students can talk to her and ask her about how she reached those four finals and how she prepared for that. Or, we can invite Gervasio Deferr, and ask him the same questions. These are just dreams that can be unreal in a real class, but if we didn’t dream about improving our classes, who will do it for us?.

Link to the news, if you want to read the whole article (in Spanish): http://www.20minutos.es/noticia/2289589/0/almudena-cid-narra-vivencia/trayectoria-deportiva-dos/cuentos-infantiles/

When I was in my last practice time, my tutor and I had a problem: “How we can teach children to use the auxiliary verb ‘do’ in negative sentences without making the explanation boring?” and there was where my mind starts to think about a way to explain it without saying the grammar part. We have to take into account that children of 6-7 years didn’t know how to build correctly a sentence (subject + verb + complements) at this time of the course, because this part was later.

Talking to my tutor, she told me that she thinks about creating a character named Mr. Do who needs the negative particle ‘not’ to appear and help them to create the negative sentence. So, starting from this idea, I decided to give our character a “body”, in order to help children with it, because if children see that Mr. Do exists, they pay more attention to our explanation and they also remember what Mr. Do wants to help us.

But all this thoughts could be nothing if Mr. Do doesn’t work in class and teach children how to create the structure of a negative sentence. To know that, we have to apply it in our class, so my tutor called all the children to the “assembly space” and introduce Mr. Do with questions to the children, for example:

• Teacher: Alejandro, do you like apples?
• Alejandro: Yes, I do
• Teacher: Ok, and, Lucia, do you like bananas?
• Lucia: No, I don’t (because children knows how to answer correctly that questions)
• Teacher: Ok, so, to learn how to say that Lucia doesn’t like bananas, we need “Mr. Do”
• Children: Mr. Do???
• Teacher: Yes, Mr. Do is a special guest for saying that we don’t like something. So, he will help us if we give him our ‘not’ of the sentence. For example: I wrote “I like apples”, but, how I can say that “I not like apples”? I need Mr. Do, who helps me if I give him… what Mr. Do needs?
• Children: The no!!!
• Teacher: That’s right! So, he will come to our sentence (I do not like apples) and we write I don’t like apples.

I think this method can work to teach children how to make a negative sentence if they don’t know “conscientiously” how to create a sentence, and, from this experience, I knew that they like the character because they told me “Jaime, will you bring back Mr. Do again?” and I have to answer that I don’t know because Mr. Do is too busy working for other children.

To end the post, I leave you here a question: Do you think this kind of resources will help children to learn better?

When we saw in the seminar the video of a class doing a jazz chant, I was surprised about the “strange” letters in the room, so I want to search about what language is this and why Jazz Chants are there. Finding at home for more Jazz Chants, I discover that this language is Filipino and they are from the Republic of Philippines.

And you can be thinking: “Why Jazz Chants arrive in Philippines?”. Well, I continue finding about it and I found that, from 2008 to 2012, there were the “National English Jazz Chants Festival” supported by the Department of Education of the Government of Philippines, so it shows that the government understand that Jazz Chants are a good methodology to help children to learn English, so they create a festival to develop it.

I think this is a good way to introduce new techniques and new tools to learn English, also in countries where English is the official language. Can you think something like this (a festival) in Spain? Or even in Alcalá, Madrid or Guadalajara?

Maybe you think this is not possible nowadays because children doesn’t have the level required to do it, but this can be a stimulation for them to learn English and understand that learning a new language can be fun. If TV series like “Dora, the Explorer” or the official exams of Cambridge can motivate children to be interested in English and to obtain a good result for them, this “funny” things can be a good thing to increase their motivation.

Is Competition good for kids?

This festival made me think about if competition is good or bad for children. The American author, Alfie Kohn says that “If one child wins, another cannot. Competition leads children to envy winners, to dismiss losers.” so that can make that we think that competition is bad for children because allow them to “put stickers” on their classmates about who is good at something and who is not as good as the others at other things, but he also says that “Co-operation (…) is marvellously successful (…). Children feel better about themselves when they work with others instead of against them”.

Many specialists on children said that healthy competitions are good for children, but all the competitions are “healthy”? What makes a competition “healthy”?. If a healthy competition is about working in groups to not demotivate students, I think we are not doing what we have to do, because in real life, they are going to compete alone, and if we used to our children to be always in groups for everything, maybe we are preparing them for an unreal future.

Link to a video of the winners of 2011 edition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bzhB4MqgEY

Link to their Facebook page (there are information only till the 4th NEJCF in 2011) http://www.facebook.com/pages/National-English-Jazz-Chants-Festival/113346822069127

Link to a webpage where there’s a debate about competition and children: http://www.ineos.com/articles/inch-issue-5-2013/debate-is-competition-good-for-kids/

Jolly Phonics in a class of 1^st of Primary

During my second practical period, I was in a class of 1^st of Primary in where the teacher knows about that method because she learned about it in a course and wants to test it in her class to see if it would works in a real classroom or if it has some weak points that the publishing house didn’t tell them, so my teacher and other teachers of the English department ask the school about the possibility of buying the material to test it in 2 classes: one in 1^st of Primary and the other in 2^nd of Primary.

The school accepted the proposal of the department and buy all the material required to test Jolly Phonics in the school. The material consists on a CD to work with Jolly Phonics at the Digital Whiteboard, flashcards with the sounds individually, in pairs, in trios and words formed and a mural with all the sounds by level.

Start working with the material

When the school receive the material, we start to work with it in class showing firstly the easiest sounds (s, a, t, i, p, n). First we present the letter telling them a story about the picture they see in the mural, then we listen to the song of each one and do the movement and the last thing was doing the activities the publishing house included in the CD.

Although the children like the songs and the movements, that wasn’t the real test of the material, because they can learn the songs and the movements as a game, but the aim of the department was improve the correct pronunciation of the words we saw in class in Science or in English classrooms and for this concept the use of Jolly Phonics was great, because when one child doesn’t pronounce correctly a word, we told him: “This ‘u’ is like the ‘u’ of umbrella, do you remember the movement? And how do you pronounce it?”, so they can evaluate themselves if they are pronounce it well or not and the teachers didn’t say them anything more that “remember the song, the movement and the sound”.

Finally, I post you here a video from YouTube with all the movements of each sound: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqaP19rUwz4

I start writing in this blog for the subject “Exploring Children’s Literature in English” as a project made by our teacher, Raquel Fernández. The project consists on writing our own posts to show our reflections or things we like related to the topics we are seeing in class, so I hope you like the posts I will make and you learn new things!