I suppose that when you were a child, you used to listen the music that your parents or old brothers or sisters listened to, don´t you? And then you singed aloud at home without understand almost any word that you were saying. In my case, my father is a big fan of Joan Manuel Serrat, so I grow up singing lyrics like Mediterraneo or Caminante no hay camino, as you can see, there are difficult lyrics that a little child cannot understand. However when I was a teenager and I was studying literature at high school, I realized that those lyrics I had interiorize some years ago there were poems. Then I found some others music bands that use well known poems to make it songs like Marea with Ciudad de los gitanos by Federico García Lorca or Tierra Santa with Canción del Pirata by José de Espronceda. Even there are some CDs composed by poems of an author and singed by different artists, I have found one of Antonio Machado and another one of Pablo Neruda.

So… I was wondering if this will happen with the English poets too. Because of that I started to look for information (difficult task because I don´t know lots of the names that appear in my research and I didn´t know if there are famous English poets or not). And… as we can expect, the most of the song I have found are about Shakespeare poem, but there are others too like: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda or Federico García Lorca have songs in English too! Now we are going to go one by one. I´m going to show you some works of each author.

William Shakespeare: About him there is an album which is a compilation of some of his sonnets performed by famous actors and musicians. It is called When love speaks. Here I give you one of them.

Live with me and be my love by Annie Lenox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBxOsITRPeU

Edgar Allan Poe has a poem, Annabel Lee which it have been versioned by different musicians, here you have the one who did Tiger Army, but there are some other versions by Radio Futura and by an Israeli singer, Shlomo Artzi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZScUxZbe-AQ

Emily Dickinson has a lyric album with her poems too, singed by Aaron Copland and Enrico Maria Polimanti.

Federico García Lorca has a poem Pequeño Valls Vienés that belongs to the book Poeta en Nueva York which Leonard Cohen versioned with a song called Take this Waltz. Have a look, personally I love it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8nWVWE4sjk

Pablo Neruda has a whole album too with some of his sonnets recorded by musicians. The album is called Neruda.

I´d like to go deeper and explain you a little bit more about each writer and author but that is going to take me a lot of time, so if you are interested on it please don´t dude and look for information about it, ask me for help if you need it.

To conclude I have to say that I´ve learnt a lot preparing this post and I hope you will learn and enjoy as I have done.

Then we have done an activity in which we had to create our own character following the structure given by the teacher, Raquel. Here I start to think about that and, I´ve remembered that when I was a child I always wanted to be a super heroine, but I didn´t like the known super heroines like Catwoman or Storm, so I decided to invented a little super girl. She hasn´t got a name yet, because I´m still creating, but it will have one in a couple of hours. She is a normal girl, who goes to school and try to solve the daily problems of the school life.

I think this character it will be useful for children, because it´s really near to them and the problems are easy happened in the daily life of a normal student of primary education. I know that there are a lot of character similar to this one, but the special feature about mine it is that the truth is that she isn´t a really super heroine, but with her powerful imagination she wear her super heroine suit and fight bravely every day to rich victorious the 6^th grade graduation.

I think when I finish the activity of create my character I will write a short story about it, because this project it made me think and I have lots of ideas related with my character adventures and experiences. So, if I had time, I will write some of them.

See you soon!! J

When my group and I were working on it, the first thing we did was to think about the space that we wanted to dedicate to the library in our class. We decided to locate it in a corner, in order to let the children relax in this part of the class while they read. We tried to separate it physically, with some stairs and cupboards. In this step we realized that we need to take into account the amount of money we have and how much each thing cost. But we don´t stop and think about the budget yet.

Then, we were thinking about the activities we will going to develop to make the classroom library an interesting place and to make sure ourselves that this space was going to be used for our students. We found and create lot of interesting activities like Top Reader, The Innocent Hand, Create your bookmark and much more, but I´m not going to develop each activity here, to know more about them you have to wait until the next Tuesday.

Well, after create the activities we started to think more seriously in the budget. We tried to do it as real as we could. And, being honest, in this moment in our country anybody can spend big amounts of money in anything. Taking into account this disadvantage, we tried to carry out the project with a very small budget. We decided to do a Readers Fair. In this fair, we collect founds to buy new books. Then with the school budget and the money collected we were looking for cheap furniture to complete our library in an economic Swedish shop. We bought some cupboards, some comfortable chairs and a carpet.

Et… voilà here we have our classroom library finished.

I must say that I enjoy doing this project because it is an imaginary project but I think that in the future, when we had to do it really, is going to be a really difficult task. We are going to found lot of impediments that we will have to know how to solve it. For the moment we have an idea about how useful and how difficult is it.

This week we have been working in class with fingerplays, but at the beginning I can´t find any difference between fingerplays and nursery rhymes. For me was the same thing or something very similar. Then, after read about this topic, I discover that the main difference is that in one of them you use your fingers and in the other you don´t have to, but usually you have to do some body movements or dancing too. Because of that a fingerplay is a kind of nursery rhyme. Here I give you both definitions:

As you all know, nursery rhymes are short and simple songs or poems for children. And fingerplays are songs or chants for little children in what you have to coordinate some hand movements with the words you are singing, in order to catch the attention and the interest of the children.

Now I think is really clear, I´m going to show you some examples:

Nursery rhyme:

The Big Ship Sails on The Ally-Ally-Oh

The big ship sails on the ally-ally-oh
The ally-ally-oh, the ally-ally-oh
Oh, the big ship sails on the ally-ally-oh
On the last day of September.
The captain said it will never, never do
Never, never do, never, never do
The captain said it will never, never do
On the last day of September.
The big ship sank to the bottom of the sea
The bottom of the sea, the bottom of the sea
The big ship sank to the bottom of the sea
On the last day of September.
We all dip our heads in the deep blue sea
The deep blue sea, the deep blue sea
We all dip our heads in the deep blue sea
On the last day of September.

Fingerplay:

Five little popcorn seeds sitting in a pot

Have the children squat down low 

One got hot and it went “Pop!”

Jump on the word “Pop!” 

Repeat with Four, three, two, one, and no more popcorn seeds sitting in the pot.

Variation: You may want to start with the number of children in your class rather than the number five.

In this webpage is indicated the movements that you have to do when you are singing. So the song is in bold letter and the movements in italic letter.

• http://www.teachpreschool.org/

• http://www.dreamenglish.com/

I´ve been exploring this website because Raquel, our teacher, told us about it and it is very complete. You can find songs and games to learn lot of things like numbers, colors, animals… In addition you can work on specific topics like festivities. Now it is plenty of Halloween songs and is great for young children!

Here I give you some other links for resources:

• http://www.preschoolrainbow.org/preschool-rhymes.htm
• youtube.com/watch?v=09zOOveEVew

In this first post I´m going to talk about the importance of storytelling in the learning process of the children. The way they learn through the different stories and the characteristics of a good storyteller.

Let´s start! I´m sure all of you can remember a couple of storybooks of when you were children. Stories that leave a sing inside you. Books that you remember it fondly. Books that make you smile when you think about it.

Well, in my opinion this happen because when you listened or you read that story it was the best moment ever to receive it. The story shocked you so much that you remember it in the adulthood (difficult thing).

This it wasn´t be possible without the help of the “guide”. Normally this guide was your parents, your teachers or someone near to you when you were a child. He or she choose the story, choose the moment and, the most important thing, choose the way of telling you the story. All of these are the tasks of a good storyteller, which turn a normal story in a meaningful story.

The good storyteller, apart from the tasks mentioned, has to enjoy the story. He has to live the story like the first time he heard it, trying to spread his feelings to his audience. He has to create and to maintain the mystery until the last page he read to catch the attention of the little public every moment. For this task is very useful to make lot of mimic or gestus and to use the body language to help them to understand the hole story, like we have seen at Michael Rosen´s videos.

For all these reasons, I think, we have to be really grateful to our parents and to our teachers for chose that wonderful stories for us. Now, like future teachers, we have to taking to account the importance of chose one book and no other, because is in our hand to wake up good feelings about reading and consequently a good reading habit.

In my case some of my meaningful books are:

• “El Principito” of Antoine de Saint Exupéry
• “Elmer” of David Mckee
• “La calle” of Enric Larreula

And my “guides” were my parents and my Infant Education teacher, Marisa. Thank you.

I invite you to comment about yours.

Yéssica Segarra