Nowadays, as everyone can see in media or even as we have already seen in our practicum times, education process needs a change. I ask myself, why do we have the necessity of following text book line by line? Along the degree we have realised of the disadvantages of this methodology. Besides we have learnt a lot of resources in order to be carried out in a class apart from the books which could give better results not only to teachers but also to the real protagonists of the teaching and learning process, students.

Regarding the subject, Children’s literature in English, the fact that kept my attention most was the huge amount of literature resources to be used even in a different class to Spanish language.  Storytelling, stories, theatre, poetry are those general topics we have worked on during this semester. I am really amazed about all the activities, resources or ideas we have learnt related to the previous words. Moreover I am not surprised only about the activities but also about the possibility of connecting them with all the other subjects.

As I have already commented on storytelling, stories, and poetry I would like to highlight the fact of bringing theatre into our classes. You are conscious of all the activities that we were practising last week, and also I would say that all of us were spending a good time during this lesson. For that reason, I am not going to summarise them. I just want to talk about one thought that came to my mind while we were representing Disney character figures. My 3^rd year students are learning the animal kingdoms and I know that memorising them is very boring for them, even more for those who do not like natural sciences. So on Monday I was thinking about using this resource in order to review the contents. For example, asking them to represent an animal from the reptiles’ kingdom and so on. I promise I will do it.

So once we have already finish most of our activities I am looking forward to see the results of the plot summary we are preparing and I am very grateful with all we have learnt during this months. Finally, I hope my post had been useful and interesting for all of you. Thank you for reading them and I have to say that in my opinion you have done a good job!

As I said in my previous post, when I think about poetry I just can imagine lists of authors, senseless poems or different periods of the history. This time, Raquel asked us to create our own poems and I am sure you can imagine my feelings after listening that. My group can tell you exactly what I said “I do not have imagination, I cannot do it or I am not good when writing poetry.” However, after finishing the class I went out of there feeling proud of my work.

The teacher asked us to create a poem following different rules. In our case the rules consisted on thinking on an object common in fairy tales and writing a poem with its shape. We chose the Snow-white apple and we started imagining. At first I wrote sentences and words related with the topic but without any sense. I thought I was not going to be able of finishing it on time. However, as time went on ideas where coming to my mind and finally we created a poem which even rhymed.

I wanted to comment on it because we are forming ourselves in order to treat with children. I am sure we all have listen during our practicum times children saying things like “I cannot do it”.  Regarding poetry, which is a very common topic in which most people feel uncomfortable with, we think we have not  enough imagination to create poems. However, as we saw in previous sessions we have a huge amount of resources available for helping our students when writing poetry.

And finally, regarding what I said at the beginning, poetry is not just authors, difficult sentences or memorising without any sense. Even if we work individually or in groups we can create good works, the only essential things would be motivation, relevant topics and a bit of imagination. Don’t you think so?

On Monday during the middle group we have been working with poetry in class. I am not going to disclose so much information about it considering that the other half group has not taken this lesson yet. However, I decided to highlight some of the main ideas which seem to me that could be very useful if we take them into account when deciding to use poetry with our students.

Let me start with my feelings just after the lesson as I left the class with the general idea of poetry as a great resource for children learning. What is more, it was an idea that I have never thought about before when designing my own extracurricular classes for primary. Later I will tell you a recent experience I had with my pupils this week during the extracurricular lesson when trying to include poetry in it. One thing I discovered was that poetry can be applied in many different situations and it can involve different subjects.

Regarding my students way of learning I was trying to find different resources in order to help them with social and natural sciences. In particular, two of my students from 5^th grade had several problems to study these subjects. Week by week they were discovering different ways to studying such as drawings, schemas, tables or microteachings. So I thought why not to introduce poetry in their way of learning?  I do not lose anything just for trying, so I did it.

This day they were learning the different types of economic activities (primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors). When they arrived to the class they did not know the differences between them so I ask them to read the first sector and to create a stanza with the most important information both together. I was amazed of their creativity. And afterwards they had to do the same with the other two sectors but they have to do it one each and then put them in common.

Both girls were really happy with the activity, not only because they had learnt the contents easily, but also they had created poetry. And what is more, they went out of the class telling their mums they were poetess. However, there is one curious thing when they told that to their mums, I had to explain them the reason why they were creating poems in science class because I noticed their little confused eyes looking at me.  But I think it was a great discover! Don’t you think so?

Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1939) was a psychologist and educator who analysed in depth the story and discovered an unconscious message inside. In order to understand his point, it is important to know that this psychologist believes that our mind is composed by both conscious and unconscious elements and latter ones are those who influence us on the way we believe or we act. Furthermore, he explains that this division is exactly the same for adults and for children.

Regarding these thoughts, Bruno Bettelheim described the sibling rivalry and Cinderella’s mistreatment as the essential theme of the story, something that is directly related with some unconscious problems that children have within their families and that lead them to love this story.

As all of us well know the story tells how Cinderella is suffering degradation by her stepsisters and is obligated to do the dirtiest work in the house even if she is behaving well. How many of you have never felt jealous of your siblings or other children?  Moreover how many times have your parents compared you with your sisters or brothers? Children feel identified with this story, even if their situation is not too bad. They already know it.  In the story, whereas Cinderella’s step mother and step sisters mistreat her, she is loved by the rest of the world. This is what helps children to learn how to resolve their problems and to think that they are not so bad.

There is a very interesting document in which apart from this information you can find other curious details that make you think about the story. For example, the relationship of the small feet with the eastern world or the rivalry between siblings presented in some stories of German authors are some of the curious ‘coincidences’ we can find in the unconscious message that this story could transmit. I really encourage you to read the document I will post below because you are going to find interesting information and a lot of food for commenting on our blog.

http://sutterfield.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/6/8/12686139/bruno_bettelheim.pdf

First of all we were talking in small groups about those things we remembered of our childhood. Once we were putting it in common with the rest of the class there were diversity of memories. However, there was something that I was a bit shocked about.  There were some of us who agreed on the fact that reading when we were teenagers was so boring. Why does it happen? Does it depend on students who do not like reading or is the study planning the responsible of that?

Based on my own experience, I have to admit something. At the age of twelve, reading was the most boring, disgusting and senseless activity I had to face with. At the school I enjoyed reading, as I said I loved books such as Kika’s adventures, meanwhile once I entered in the high school I started reading for obligation and I stopped considering reading as a fun activity.

I remember myself reading a huge amount of books, doing a summary of all of them, doing exams, reading them as much quickly as possible and even crying because I could not finish one of them on time. In my opinion, and I would like to know yours, it should not be like that. Nowadays, it is said that young people read less or even do not read at all. I was lucky because I discovered again the meaning of reading for pleasure but I am asking now how many of my classmates stopped reading at the age of 12 or 13 years old and have not taken a book since then.

As a conclusion I would like to say that we, as teacher, should be aware of these facts and think in our experience. We know what we liked doing or not, so we should try to keep it in mind. Reading for pleasure in my case is one of my favourite hobbies, I love having some free time and enjoying of a good book. For that reason I think that the first thing we should do is to help our students to have fun when reading instead of reading a lot of boring books in a short period of time without any sense at all.

This woman is a synthetic phonics expert who thinks that this method is the most effective one for teaching reading and writing. She has spoken in front of teachers and even parents advising them about the method and its benefits. You can find a huge amount of information and videos about her conferences which ended up being so interesting for me.

One thing that kept my attention was the difference between the alphabetic code and the alphabet and the importance of studying both while learning English. This is something I never thought about before. I remember me singing the alphabet song in English when I was a child but that is all. That is the reason why I decided to go deeper in this topic.

According to her, both are really important roles to play with our students. The English language has 26 symbols to write the sounds and these symbols make up the alphabet. However, there are more sounds than letter shapes. Now we are talking about the alphabetic code, in which one sound can be represented by several letters or vice versa, one letter or group of letters can have different pronunciations.

“Beginners need to associate letters with their sounds not their names when learning to read and spell.”

One remarkable thing she tells in one of her speeches made people think about this method and the current necessity of using it. She was in an infant class and her students were learning the “s” sound. Debbie Hepplewhite was giving them examples of the sounds “s” such as snake or soup when suddenly a 4 years-old girl raised up her hand and said: “My name is Alice and I hear the “s” sound in my name but when I write it down , I cannot see the letter s.” It was then when the expert in synthetic phonics, started teaching them that there are other groups of letters that sound equal to the “s” one. This event shows the importance of using resources, the alphabet and the alphabetic code at the same time.

At first sight all that given information may lead us to think only about the advantages and the effectiveness of the synthetic phonics method, but what is your point of view? Do you think that this method is the best one or maybe has some hidden disadvantages?

During this term I am going to comment on this blog about several things such as issues that we are discussing in class, my own researches about some of them or even things that I would like to share with you.

I hope you like them and thank you so much for visiting us!