During the last Medium group session, we worked on the last literary genre: drama. The lesson was especially focused on learning different ways of promoting drama skills, as well as other competences and abilities, in educative contexts through active group games.

Instead of carrying out the lesson inside the classroom, our teacher Raquel decided to make us experience the games, so that we could put ourselves in the students’ shoes and realise how useful and fun they were. So, we went to the gym and we became kids for two hours, playing a lot!. Here I want to share with you three of the games, concretely those I liked the most:

On the one hand, the “Frozen film frames”. For developing this activity, we had to walk around the gym at the rhythm of the music. When the music was stopped, we had to remain still, representing one literary character by doing one of their typical actions (i.e: Hercules showing his biceps). Then, the teacher asked some of us who we were and what we were doing.

After playing individually for some times, we played the same game in groups. In this case, when the music was stopped, the teacher said the name of a children’s book and we had to arrange in small groups, assign a character to each person and represent one of the most important situations of the story.

Through this game, children develop drama skills (body language, improvisation, role-playing…), as well as creativity, imagination and descriptions. Furthermore, it can also be used to teach and revise subject contents, as, for example, the topic to represent could be “invertabrate animals” or “landforms”.

Seven dwarfs going to work. – Source: Raquel Fernández

On the other hand, the “Photo Album”. For this game, two people sat down in one bench and pretended that they were looking at a photo album and talked about the pictures. Meanwhile, some other students were standing up, next to them, and displayed the situations described, freezing as photographs.

Finally, the “Machine”, a very fun game to foster group union and cooperative work. It consists on creating a machine. For that, all the students make a circle and one of them stays in the centre. This kid starts to do a repetitive sound (i. e: beep – beep – beep), and then, one by one, the other students joins the machine by touching one of the members and making another different sound (i.e: brrrrrrrrbrbrbrbrbrrrrrr); until everybody is a part of the machine and all sounds sound together at the same time.

As you may imagine and I believe, all these games attract the attention of the students since the very beginning and they find them really interesting, so every teacher can use them to teach any subject content or to foster different competences and skills.

Do you know any other game for drama lessons? I am wishing to hear about them!!

Thank you for visiting!

Today I am going to share with you the last project we are carrying out, the Aladdin’s workshop; and particularly, the workshop my group and I are preparing: Discovering the cultural secrets of Arabia.

During the last two weeks, we have been preparing a workshop that we are developing next Tuesday, 25^th November, with a group of students from a public school in Alcalá de Henares.

The pillars of this project are the powerful and multiple uses of children films in education. I think that all of us are sure that every film, even those that we think are simple and with a basic plot, can be used in many different ways to present the contents to kids through a motivating, enjoyable and cross-curricular methodology, and interesting and close materials and resources.

For this project, the workshops are devoted to teaching Science contents through English and through Aladdin’s film. For that, we are working on six different workshops, each of them dedicated to one Science topic; using the characters, places, elements and other aspects present in Aladdin’s film as the medium to carry out the teaching-learning process.

In my case, my group decided to work on Arabian culture (“The secrets of Arabia”), as the film is constantly presenting, both directly through the dialogues or songs, or indirectly, by just showing them in the scenes, the main aspects of that area and its culture: places in Arabia, artistic elements such as the decoration of the streets or houses, the music, instruments and dances; market products like food or ornaments, animals, monuments, laws and rules, clothing, social classes, gender differences (men vs. women), religious beliefs, etc.

As you can see, there is an enormous amount of elements that we can work on. However, we are only having twenty minutes to develop the whole workshop, so we have chosen the four following topics for teaching them directly:

1. Geography: Location of Arabia in the world map and the Geography of the country.
2. Market: products sold in markets and ways of buying them.
3. Palace: social classes and laws of Arabia.
4. Palace Gardens: Art, music, instruments and dances.

Furthermore, we have to take into account that we are living in the era of technology, so we are introducing ICTs in almost every corner. Then, the whiteboard will be used to show the maps and to present the Palace rooms in which the students will click to see the different laws of Arabia; and a computer is used to watch the Arabian dance and listen to the song while learning the choreography.

Finally, to conclude the workshop, we are letting the kids use their cameras to feel like tourists and take pictures or selfies in every corner, and we are giving them a souvenir from Arabia to thank them for their visit and wish them a good day.

As you may have noticed because of the topics the majority of the last posts were about, these two last weeks we have been working on one of the most important elements and resources in Children’s Literature: tales.

According to Wikipedia, tales are “generally short stories based on real or imaginary situations, inspired or not in previous writings or legends, with a simple plot protagonised by a reduced group of characters […] and that have been passed from generation to generation, both in an oral or written way”

In my previous post, I shared with you The original stories behind the tales we know, like the real Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the Three Bears or The Lion King; and, as this past Monday we learnt about the characters that usually make up tale stories, in this post I would like to go deeply on this topic. So, here I present you the different types of characters we may find in every tale story:

-   Hero/Heroine: The character that protagonises the story, and, although in most of the stories it is a male character, due to the historic tradition of giving the man the power and strength, there are also female characters as heroines. Some examples are the Superheroes, such as Spiderman or Superman; Peter Pan, or the Disney Princesses, like Mulan or Belle.

Furthermore, one of the main characteristics of heroes is that they often move vertically, and we can notice that in the way the Superheroes climb or fly.

         Shrek (Shrek)         Source: Wikipedia

-    True Love: The character that the hero/heroine is in love with, and for whose true love he/she fights. As an example, we have Fiona, in Shrek; and, although it can be not considered a fairy tale (although I believe that every story can be transformed into a fairy tale for kids), I think that Dulcinea, the True love of Don Quixote, perfectly fits to this definition.

     Esmeralda (The Hunchback                of Notre Dame).              Source: Galleryhip

-    Villain: The character that opposes the hero, related to evil powers and wicked actions. The best examples are Disney Villains, such as Scar, Ursula or Jafar; but also there are evil prototypes in traditional tales, like the wolves, witches and stepmothers.

            Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty)                Source: Wikipedia

-     Elder: The character, usually a king or a father, who normally remains at home (sometimes disabled) or does not change so much along the story. Examples of elders are Mufasa, Rafiki , Papa Smurf or Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.

                 Mufasa (The Lion King)                    Source: Fanpop

-    Helper: The powerful or magical character who gives advice or valuable gift to the hero/heroine and often tests them; like, for example, Tinkerbell, Cinderella fairies and Jiminy Cricket.

                 Jiminy Cricket (Pinocchio)                   Source: Wikipedia

-     Friend: The character that accompanies the hero, often belonging to lower class. In this case, I would like to emphasise that it is usually my favourite character in every tale story, and I think that also for many kids; as it is fun, loyal and a little bit crazy. Some examples are the amusing Timon and Pumba in the Lion King, or the charming Donkey in Shrek.

                 Dory (Finding Nemo)                 Source:  Pixar Wikia

-     Messenger: The character, human or not, that brings news. In case of Disney, it could be Sebastian or Hermes; and in traditional tales, the birds or royal postmen.

       Sebastian (The Little Mermaid)    Source: allfreevectors

Now, that we have learnt the character motifs, their characteristics and some examples for each one; Raquel has told us that it is our turn to create a new example for one of the motifs. I am working on this activity now, and it is really amazing, as there are plenty of possibilities to take and it could lead to crazy stories.

And, I am sure that it would be great if you also join us in this journey of being character creators, and you also make up an interesting character for a new and surprising story!! We would be glad and excited to know about them!!

Finally, I hope you all liked this post!!

Thank you for visiting! See you next week!

Those horrific stories were originally passed on orally from generation to generation until some writers, such as Perrault, Brothers Grimm or Walt Disney decided to convert the tales into books and films, making some changes until the stories evolved to the current happy tales we all know.

This is what we were learning during the last week’s medium group session, when we read two versions of Cinderella, Perrault’s and Grimm Brothers’, and compared them with the one we have watched in the Disney film. I was really impressed about the evolution of the story and the big differences among the versions; and, as I really liked discovering this, I would like to share with you the real cruel stories of some beautiful tales that we all know (I wish I do not ruin your childhood… :P).

Firstly, we can start with the innocent Little Red Riding Hood. In our version, she disobeys the advice of her mother in her way to visit her grandmother and walks slowly and entertains through the dangerous forest. Then, as the wolf is faster, he arrives earlier to grandmother’s house. He eats her, dresses up with grandma’s clothes, waits for the girl and eats her too. But a hunter discovers what happened and takes a knife to open the wolf’s abdomen; so, Caperucita and her grandmother go out of the wolf, they fill his abdomen with stones and finally the thirsty wolf goes to drink water to a lake, falls down and sinks because of his weight. However, the original version is more sadistic, as the wolf makes Little Red Riding Hood drink her grandmother’s blood before carving up and eating her. (You can find the different versions of Little Red Riding Hood here).

Goldilocks and the Three Bears is one of the most changed stories. We think that Goldilocks is a curious little girl who discovers the three bears’ house and touches some furniture and eat some soup before she sleeps in one of their beds. When the bears come, they get angry because someone has been in their house, but when they find Goldilocks in the bed, she is faster that the bears and escapes through the window before they kill or eat her; or, in other more recent versions, the bears behave well and even help her. Contrary to that, in the original version, Goldilocks was an old and hungry woman that was tortured by the bears and impaled in the spire of the bell tower. (You can find other versions of Goldilocks and The Three Bears here and here).

In case of The Lion King, the king is killed by his jealous brother and his son wants revenge. Although Rosencrantz (Timon) and Guildenstem (Pumba) try to distract him, he finally kills the jealous brother. And actually, in some versions, everyone dies.

Finally, I would like to share with you some interesting links where you can find more information about this topic: all versions of one tale, the history of the evolution of some stories; the reasons why each version was like it was depending on the social, economic, political and cultural circumstances, etc.:

• The real stories behind these Disney Movies will ruin your childhood
• The real stories behind 9 Disney Movies
• Top 10 gruesome fairy tale origins
• Children tales as they used to be (in Spanish)
• When children literature was for adults (in Spanish)
• The Real Snow white: Maria Sophia Margaretha Catharina von Erthal in Carmen’s post in this blog.

Source: tumblr.com

 As I am sure that, as current and future teachers, we should encourage our students and kids to read and show them how many benefits reading has, I would like to share with you the two activities we carried out at the library that I liked the most and I believe that they were useful on promoting us to read:

On the one hand, the “Making a story up”, an activity that consisted on playing in groups with different labels (in my case, ten labels, but in depends on the age and number of kids) with single words. We had to discuss about them to create a story in which those words were all included and produce our own book by writing the story on big cardboards and decorating them with drawings that represented the situations described. Then, the books were kept on a special shelf on the library to let everyone read them. I loved that activity, as the process of making the stories up was really fun, the stories were really interesting due to the imagination we have when we are kids, and they promoted not just reading, but creativity, working in groups and other social abilities, linguistic and artistic skills, and furthermore the satisfaction of having your own book “published” and read by other people.

On the other hand, and related to some posts written two weeks ago, “The storytelling theatre”. In this game, each monitor was in charge of one group of kids who were going to become storytellers and represent their corresponding story, using puppets, in a little theatre, in which we were hidden behind. For that, the monitor chose who was going to be each character and we read the story all together, each kid their lines, and practising with the puppets. Finally, the stories were represented in the little theatre, so that we became storytellers but also enjoyed the other stories.

I hope you find those activities interesting, and it would be great if you are encouraged to share your own personal experiences in reading or interesting activities you know for the promotion of reading.

Thank you for your visit!

The teaching of both phonemes and graphemes is basic for teaching reading and writing, and it represents one of the biggest challenges to which past, present and future teachers, especially the ones working with Literature in any language, have to deal with. Depending on how the teacher prepares and leads the lesson, including the methodology carried out, the materials and resources used, the way of managing the situations, etc.; the teaching-learning process of phonics may be really motivating, fun and successful, or, on the contrary, it could become a really difficult task for both the teacher and the students, with boring lessons, confusion and even empty learning.

As we have seen in class, there is one method that teachers can follow, called Synthetic Phonics, which is aimed to teach reading and writing basing on how letters or groups of letters correspond with sounds -the link grapheme-phoneme-. As some of my classmates have already explained and demonstrated in their posts, like Susana’s or Miguel Ángel’s, this method has its advantages and disadvantages, and there is a really current debate between those experts that agree with it and consider it really useful and those that totally reject it.

In order to go further with the knowledge on it and be able to have a supported opinion about it, I decided to do some research about the method and about the most popular material to work Synthetic Phonics, which is called Jolly Phonics; and I found something that I considered it was worth it to share with you, hoping that you find it interesting too and useful for your training as future teachers: the five skills –taken as stages-, worked with Jolly Phonics, that are necessary to learn to read and to write.

To begin with, the first stage is the learning of the 42 main letter sounds –including digraphs, like oo, and the different sounds that they can make-, which is carried out through the connection between each sound with an action to represent it. The sounds are learnt following a particular order, from those simpler to those more complex.

Secondly, once children have learnt the sounds, they start the learning of letter formation, which involves children learning how to form and write letters with their pencil, and, as it occurs with the sounds, the learning goes from the most basic and used forms (i.e.: c, which could be used later to make d) to the most complex shapes.

Thirdly, the next stage consists on blending the individual sounds together to make up new words. During this process, it is important to know that we have to be aware of the fact that digraphs, despite of being represented by two letters, they are just one sound.

Then, the fourth stage is called segmenting, and it involves the identification of sounds in words, from the simplest (like cat) to the most complex. In this stage, tapping out the sounds while saying them may help (four taps = 4 sounds).

And the last stage is the learning of tricky words, which are those common words with an irregular spelling that cannot be read by blending. Some methods to learn them are: Look, Cover, Write and Check; Say as it sounds, Mnemonics, etc.

Finally, I would like to share with you the post written by Jaime, which presents a real experience in a classroom working with Jolly Phonics.

Hope you have found this first post interesting!

Rocío Hidalgo.

My name is Rocío Hidalgo and I am a 4th Year Primary Education Degree Student (Bilingual option) at Centro Universitario Cardenal Cisneros, coursing the English specialization.

As you can read in the other “Welcome” posts written by my classmates, this blog is a project for the subject “Exploring Children’s literature in English”; in which we are all involved, both our teacher, Raquel Fernández, and the students; during the first term of the year, since September to December.

As part of the project, each week I am going to write whether a new post about the contents we are working in, discussing, practicing, experiencing, etc. in class or some issues I do research on and consider that are interesting  to share with you; or commenting my peers’ posts.

I hope you learn new interesting and useful things with our posts and I encourage you to share with us your thoughts and feelings through commentaries.

Nice to “meet” you and thank you for visiting us!