Is the first time that we have the chance to work with pupils in the university, we sometimes see other groups of mates working with pupils and I have to say that I felt a little bit jealous but now we are the ones that have this challenge.

In class we were deciding which film we were going to deal with and we have had very good options as “The lord of the rings”, “The book of the jungle”, “Mary Poppins”, “Aladdin” and others. So we have to vote the ones that we liked the most and the thing was so equal between “the book of the jungle” and “Aladdin” however “Aladdin” wins. At first sight was a little bit difficult to find the didactic porpoise of this film but as the time goes by every group was thinking on the different things we could teach with this incredible film. After that we presented our topics to the rest of the mates and they told as some advices about where to place the different groups and also other topics that we can relate with the one we have chosen.

Moreover I didn´t remember the film very well so that day in the afternoon I was watching the film to see all the scenes and how funny the Gini was, the next day in my group we were all singing the songs that are displayed in the film, how anybody can remember the songs that well, but my mates did it; now I´m all the time singing it.

I would never imagine doing this at the university, but in my opinion is a very good way to practice for our future jobs, and also for being more prepared and being more involved in the task. I´m so enthusiastic, I count the days to do it and to see all of as dress up like all the characters in the film and also how you we all decorate the university. I hope you are also enjoying with this task. I would like to know what do you think about it and how do you feel?

Do you think we could adapt Disney films to explain science and other subjects to our students?

First of all, I have to say I like a lot this activity or project. For me, has been very useful because I have learnt more about how can I create a classroom library and the things that are able to do or not.

Maybe, at the beginning you can think is an easy thing to create a classroom library, but I have to say that is not as easy as I thought when I started the project. When you think in your classroom library, you have to think not only in a space the other way round, you have to thing that it has to be the SPACE, the space in which students feel comfortable and confident with themselves. Also you have to think that it has to be a very special place for them that motivate to read but also you have to think in your Head Department of your school and the budget and more things that if you don’t try to create a classroom library you don’t realize.

When I thought in that space, I thought like a child, thinking the things that I would like to have in my class when I was a child. I considered very important to be catchy with the space and also with the books that they have to read. Why also the books? Because in my opinion, at least when I was a child, some books are really boring for children, and it can cause the frustration of the student or maybe the dislike for reading books.

As teachers, we have to take into account all of these things, and pay special attention on it. My classroom library it based on some activities that we considered interesting to motivate them to read, but maybe, we have a problem with the budget and also with the things that we want to do. For this reason, I think that I have learnt form my mistakes, and it is not only select good books or create a good space and environment or create good activities for separated. It has to be all together, a good space in which there was good books and also we could do an useful activities to motivate them.

Remember! It is very crucial your election of your classroom library and for this reason you have to be responsible to take the best decision and try to do the best activities to improve and motivate them to reading books.

To finish with, I want to say that there was some Classroom library’s exhibition that I like it so much. For example the Stork’s project was for me one of the best projects next to Rocio’s group. Congratulations to all the groups because I think it was really useful for us and you did it very well.

When I was a child, my favorite book was the little mermaid, so I was reading about the original story of this book:

At the beginning, it is more or less the same story, “once upon a time, there as a mermaid who lived under the sea…she want to be human because she felt in love of a prince who lives in the land. So she decided to go to see the witch of the sea to ask for help”.
The first different thing is that the witch doesn’t steal her voice, she cuts her tongue! And when the mermaid starts walking, she fells a terrible pain in her feet, like if someone were stabbing her with a dagger. The advertisement that the bad witch gives to the mermaid is that if she gets that the prince loves her more than he loves his parents, she will be able to stay with him forever, but if he got married with another girl, she will die and she will convert into sea foam.

She, meet the prince, and he falls in love because she is very beautiful and lovely, but his parents tell them that he is a prince, so he as to got married with a princess. So he meet a neighbor princess and after a short period of time, they got married and the poor mermaid cry and cry knowing that it was her end. But the witch gives her another opportunity to save herself and tell her that if she kills the prince and wash his feet on his blood, she will save her life, but the little mermaid is really in love of the prince, she can’t kill him so she returns to the water and die.

Finally she is compel to be 300 years making good actions.

What do you think about this story? I let you here a link where you can found another examples of the traditional book and the original stories.

http://lapiedradesisifo.com/2013/07/30/la-verdadera-historia-de-las-pel%C3%ADculas-de-disney/

Y was reflecting about why this changes along the time and why Walt Disney created the sweetest versions and maybe he wanted to protect the children of the bad and cruel things of the world to they have a better childhood…what do you think about that, do you think that they don’t know the real world and only fairy stories?

I have decided to write about a webpage that I have found which could be interesting for all of us in our future lessons as Primary teachers.

This webpage is http://www.webenglishteacher.com , and here you can find a huge amount of resources, strategies and tips for vocabulary, writing, poetry etc. in English. As this blog is dedicated for Children’s Literature, I have accessed the part that says “Reading/Literacy” to see how good is this page for us.

This part is full of resources, and as in everything, some are good and some not so good (from my point of view, obviously). You can check them if you want so that you can also give your opinion about it, but I am going to talk about three of them that got my attention and that I think that are good and we could use in our future classroom.

The first one is the one called “Character Scrapbook”:

Here, you have to invent the name of a scrapbook (álbum de recortes) and the name of character. You can also decide if the character is a person or an animal and then create it by changing the hair, the eyes, the nose… As you can also see from the picture, you can also write ten things I know about… From my point of view, this can be very useful if, for example, we let our students to create a character and we tell them to build up a story in groups using the characters they have invented.

The second one is “Classroom Strategies”: this is a webpage where you can find templates about what to do before, during and after reading a book. As we have learned also in another subject “Designing and delivering effective lessons for the English Primary classroom”, it is very important to motivate our students to read, but also to scaffold the outputs they are going to produce with these readings.

And finally, the third one is related with the previous one: “103 things to do before/during/after reading”:

In this case, is not about templates, but activities that you can tell your students to do. Some of them are really interesting, such as creating an advertisement of the book as it were a film, to write a story about one of the characters like if he/she travels out of the book into today or to write an imaginary interview to the friends or family of a character.

As you can see, we can find lots and lots of resources, the only thing you need is some time to explore and critical thinking to realize what activities you can/should use at any time.

I invite you to surf in these pages and give me your opinions about it, or if you find any others also tell me

This week’s project was related to creating our very own Classroom Library. It was a tough task to do, if we wanted to make it operative, attractive and affordable. There were plenty of things to be taken into account, but I was positive about not leaving aside what could help the students to get the most of the opportunity that having a Classroom Library can bring to their reading experience.

It would be naïve to think that students are going to read, just because we, the teachers, want them to do it. There must be something that ignites the intrinsic motivation that will create real long-lasting readers, and sometimes we have to make use of different strategies to get it.

You could think now that if you want them to read, you need books, and I agree, although paper books are not the only type of books that we can present to our pupils. In this case, my proposal is about an online resource that can be really useful for both pupils and teachers, and it could also involve parents in their children’s learning experience.

It is called Raz-Kids, and I had the chance to see how it works last year. This award-winning programme allows pupils to access to hundreds of levelled books (fiction and non-fiction), and they have the opportunity to read, listen to, or even recording the stories themselves. Apart from this, they can take some quizzes that will make them earn points to be used to create their own robots and reading rockets. This works wonders as extra motivation for the pupils, who want to read and take the quizzes to improve their level.

It sounds good for students, but…what does it have for the teachers? In fact, plenty of things. It allows not only to monitor the amount of reading done by each pupil, but also the quality of the reading. For example, and thanks to the quizzes that the students take so willingly in order to earn points, the programme generates a lot of useful information for the teachers, as shown in the next pictures.

The license is intended for a class of up to 36 students and 1 teacher. Each pupil has their own password, and the teacher can control some features for the pupils, such as the beginning level, if they can play or not with the robot, or if it is allowed for them to access books in Spanish.

If I had the chance to use it in my future jobs as a teacher, I would do it, no doubt. What about you? Do you consider it interesting? I am looking forward to have your feedback!

Thanks for reading, comments will be welcome

Welcome to my third post. Today I want to talk about the class we had related with tales, more specifically with “Cinderella”.

Most of us know the story because we have seen the sweet version of Disney. But the truth is that the original versions are not that sweet and for that reason the target of this story it wasn´t for children in a first place but for members of the high society.

In my opinion, it is really interesting to see how different versions appeared in different times and places and apparently, they didn’t know about the existence of the other story or version. From my point of view this is a bit strange, and I wonder how can this be possible, maybe it is just a coincidence, but there are some specific things they have in common that made me been really suspicious about it. For example, in both versions, Grimm’ and Perrault’, the mother of Cinderella dies, the father get married for a second time, Cinderella has two stepsisters that treat her badly, the Prince looks for a Queen and celebrates a ball or festival, Cinderella forget the slipper and so on. I don’t know about you but I think this is too much to just be a coincidence.

Anyway, I can’t say they were copying ideas but that’s what it seems to me. With this, I don’t mean to say this is something bad, they are just different versions, the same happens with the movies. There are a lot of films that have been versioned by different directors and each of them changes something, because they evolve with the pass of the time; ideas, thoughts, beliefs… changes with the society and I think movies are a good way of reflect them.

Finally, I want to add that we have to be very careful with the things we take to class. In the case of the tales, sometimes we are not aware of some messages that can be transmited. Sometimes we are focusing on something that much that we can’t see in an objective way and this is something that we can’t allow to ourselves as future teachers.

During my first year of Practicum in CEIP Cristobal Colón the students had a small library in each classroom, it was a surprise for me taking into account that in the school there is a library already but when I asked my tutor about it she told me that the “big” library was mainly used by teachers so they decided to make a small place with books for children in each classroom. That space was mainly used when someone finished an activity really quickly or there are only few minutes until the class will finish, then they could take a book they want and read it. In my class the students also had a reading hour on Fridays but on those hours instead using the library they had in class, all the pupils were reading the same book and after that they were doing different activities about the pages they read.

During my second year of Practicum in Gredos San Diego the way of using the books was a real surprise for me, they didn’t had a classroom library but instead of that, each one of the students had to bring everyday a book he/she likes to the school, the curious thing was that they used to read every day after the break for ten minutes, in order to calm down and get the perfect mood to start with the class, this technique got so popular in the class that my teacher used it also when she considered that the students are not focused enough, or if the class before was Physical Education and the pupils were nervous. In Gredos San Diego there was also a reading class and it was on Fridays. But it was a little bit different, because as in Cristobal Colón that reading class was just reading and doing activities, in Gredos it was more than that, after reading we were discussing, and asking open questions to the children, also making competitions in groups with questions in order to make it more active and cooperative.

In my personal opinion I have to say that in the first school (CEIP Cristobal Colón) the activities were not developed to motivate the student but only to check if they comprehend the stories, but a good point is that they had a small library with appropriate books in each class. In fact in the second school (Gredos San Diego) they hadn’t the library but the activities of the reading classes were done to motivate the students to keep reading.

What do you think? Is it possible? Well, after the last seminar, I was thinking about that stories are something that most children use to enjoy and have fun with them, so I thought that may be it will be a good resource for us as futures teachers to use and make easier to explain some contents, or just to don’t make classes so boring.

We can use the stories as we want, for example we can change or modify one part to explain what we want, but it is not always necessary because we also can use the original story. Let’s use a simple one as Little Red Riding Hood and have a look to the first part of the story:

“Once upon a time there lived in a certain village a little country girl, the prettiest creature who was ever seen. Her mother was excessively fond of her; and her grandmother doted on her still more. This good woman had a little red riding hood made for her. It suited the girl so extremely well that everybody called her Little Red Riding Hood.

One day her mother, having made some cakes, said to her, “Go, my dear, and see how your grandmother is doing, for I hear she has been very ill. Take her a cake, and this little pot of butter.”

Little Red Riding Hood set out immediately to go to her grandmother, who lived in another village.

As she was going through the wood, she met with a wolf, who had a very great mind to eat her up”

If we pay attention, we can see that we could teach some contents using the story, for example, little red riding hood lived in a village, so we can start teaching the different locations or the types of forest that there are and the reasons of why she lived there.  Secondly we can see that she only lived with her mother, so it could be a good idea to use this situation in order  to explain the variety of families that there could be. Also we can talk about the wolf and the mammals, their diet and their way of living.

These are only some examples, but of course there are plenty of them, so, if you think that it is useful…let’s start using stories!

In this third post I would like to share with you my opinion about the role of women in Disney’ stories through the time and why it is important to read these books or to watch these movies at school.

Firstly, I would like to comment about the role of each character that you can see below.

Snow White. It was first published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm, do you remember them from the seminar? From all of the fairy tales that I could remember from my childhood, Snow White is without a doubt, the film I used to watch the most. The role of this lady is clear, taking care of the dwarfs, cleaning the house all the time and tidying up. She is a very beautiful lady who fell in love at first sight, which shows that superficiality and unrealism as the only way that she will be happy is getting married with a handsome prince.

Aurora, is a fairy tale based from “The Beauty sleeping in the Wood” by Charles Perrault, published in 1697 and later on by the Brothers Grimm. She is a princess form the English kingdom who has to abandon the castle for being cursed by Maleficent when she was a baby. The three god fairies took Aurora to a house in the woods where she could be raised safely by them. We all know that never happens and she finally pricks her finger on a spinning wheel spindle. She is in a sleepy mode till a handsome man comes and kisses her. The true story is that women, once more, are just going to be happy and safe when they have a man by their side.

Jasmine, is a character from the story Aladdin, taken from “The Book of One Thousand and One Nights” based on the role of the woman in the Middle East, where generally, women are under their fathers thumb, they do cannot make their own decisions to get married or give an opinion about something. In this case, this lady is a princess who cannot leave from the castle. She dreams about the world outside the walls and wishes that she could marry someone she really wants. In spite of this, her dad wants her to marry a man with status as the most important thing that is reflected in this story is the social class that you belong to. Finally she meets Aladdin, a poor and nice guy who wants to make her feel happy showing her his type of life to make her think that to be happy you do not need to live in a mansion or to have very expensive jewels.  However, this story continues to show that there is a need for a man, his love and recognition.

Ariel. The tale was first published in 1837 by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. This tale sacrifices everything to be with a man, her life, family and friends.

Belle, is a tale from the version “Beauty and the Beast”. It was published in 1756 by the French novelist Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Belle’s dad is an inventor who gets lost on the way back from a conference. Once Belle sees her dad’s horse without him, she goes to the woods to try to find him. She finds a castle where her dad is. Once she is in the castle she finds objects that can talk and a beast, a nobleman who was cursed by a sorceress when he didn’t want to offer her help when she needed it. The only way that the Beast can be a man again is finding his true love. Belle is a beautiful lady who is locked in a castle in exchange for her dad who is very sick and needs to rest at home. Once more we notice how the role of the lady is reproduced again, being inside a house, keeping everything clean and tidy. The only way she is going to be happy is with her true love even if she has to give up her old life.

Cinderella, a tale wrote by Giambattista Basile who published the story in 1634. Cinderella is a lady who lives with her evil stepmother and two evil stepsisters. She is in charge of cleaning after them, cooking them food and resolving their problems when they have nothing to do with her. Her life is not easy, she lost her mum when she was a kid and she doesn’t receive love from anyone. Her only friends are the animals who come to visit her and sign with her. One day, the prince sends all the young ladies an invitation for a ball. A ball that becomes in a gangway so he can choose one lady from all of them to get married. Cinderella really wants to go to the ball, with the help of the animals she makes her own dress, the one that is going to be destroyed by their jealous stepsister on the night of the ball. Her Fairy-God mother appears to make her a beautiful dress, a carriage, horses, a coachman and footmen. She looks know like someone she is not really so someone can fell in love with her. Finally, the prince sees her at the Ball, dances with her and falls in love with her, love at first sight once more.

Now let’s comment on some new roles the princesses are beginning to have in modern day films. I am showing you just two examples. I have chosen these two because I love these movies and I think there is an important moral to learn behind the stories.

Brave, this film was produced by Katherine Sarafian with John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter. The film came out in 2012 in Spain. There is a princess named Merida, she is an archer. The main idea that is transmitted with this film is the relationship that a mum and daughter have and the opposition that sometimes is needed to show what is really wanted. This film helps us to understand the position that our parents need to take and ourselves with them. This is the reason why we have arguments with our parents at some stages but in the end, we understand why they say certain things to us as they just want what´s best. What I like the most about this film is that the princess is now in action, she can do the things she has always wanted to. She does not depend on anyone and a love story is not involved in plot. Merida wants to resolve her problems on her own, finding solutions. If she is in danger it is ok as she can get out of trouble. Merida is an example of the role of some women that have to fight to achieve their aims even when she does not have any support.

Tangled, opened in Spain in 2010. The tail is called Rapunzel, I am sure most of you know who this lady is, it was written by the Brothers Grimm, and first published in 1812. In the film “Tangled”, Rapunzel discovers that it is not just a house that needs cleaning and chores, but something else. She is not really rescued by a handsome man, it is true that there is a guy in this story but she is the one that has to negotiate with him to get out the tower were she is trapped while her stepmom is out trying to find some special paints for her daughter’s birthday. This film draws attention to the power of women as any woman can carry out their purposes if they really want to. The lady that is nothing without a man is not reproduced in this film. Rapunzel can do things by herself, she is clever and she has lots of talents. The role of woman has changed; Rapunzel is not under someone’s thumb.

And that’s it. I hope you liked my post and I would be very happy if you commented on it and to share your opinion with me. I think we have to work with these fairy tales at school to make children think critically about the role of these fairytales in their favorite stories. I remember when I used to watch these films when I was a child, I just to love them and they are part of my childhood. Now is our time to make students think, it is important for them. They need to be able to identify wrong from right, in stories, in films, anything that is related to their lives during their primary education period and, as teachers we help to guide them.

Lourdes

After deep reflection and research, I realized that there are many different possibilities to offer our students with a rich variety of literature, with not too much money.

The principal one and probably the easiest is asking the students to bring their own books to the class to share with their partners. This is fantastic because we can develop other values such as generosity. Furthermore, there are a lot of disadvantages too. The first one is that we have to adapt our didactics projects according to the kind of literature provided by the students.  Another big problem is that, if we want to create a library in our mother tongue the variety of books could be great, but in a foreign language it is more difficult. Most of our students don’t have English books at home. We can to solve this problem by giving them strategies to find the books: Asking older brothers, other members from higher years of the school, cousins… However, this could be a problem too, because there are maybe some parents that don´t agree with idea of sharing and asking others. Anyway, I think taking some risks could be useful, and we should try it.

Another alternative is creating a collective project with the school, to get second hand books. I think this is great, but also we have to assume some risks. We are using the name of the school to carry out a volunteering campaign, and we are going to be responsible for its success or failure. In spite of this risk, if we are finally successfully, this could be a great benefit for all of the school, not just for you own class.

Of course, there are millions of ways to get books with a reduced budget, such as getting them in markets and second hand shops, creating agreements with the editorials… but, as in this post I am just mentioning ways to get free books, I would like to finish by sharing with you a very useful resource. This is the website www.nolotiro.org. In this website we can advertise our necessity of books, or even offer them to others. The involvement of the people in this site is huge. You can receive a lot of donated books. In fact, for my project, I have already advertised my demands.

I hope you find my post useful and I would like to encourage you to visit this website. There are a lot of people waiting for your help: maybe you can be a generous donor!