First of all I have to say that the location of the lesson was in the gym instead of in a regular classroom and what we were going to do there was more related with a theatre or body expression class than with a literature lesson. At the beginning we all were a little bit shy and afraid of doing what Raquel asked but little by little we were more relaxed.

Although the lesson was different and I felt a bit confusing it was really funny, enjoyable and original. We all participated in a very active way being volunteers or being a part of a performance, and I thought…why not using this with primary students to develop literature? It may seem crazy or difficult to carry it out but not impossible, besides it has a lot of adaptations for everything we want to teach.

So what are the advantages of using theater in school?

-It develops children imagination, creativity and the different ways of expression, not only language using all the senses.

-It gives advantages to the relationships between peers and the teacher.

-Children assimilate better the concepts and knowledge if they have to represent any idea of a subject.

-Doing theater in the class help students to talk in front of an audience, being more self-confident, to get over shyness and to express their ideas and feelings.

-It reinforces the academic task as language, reading and literature through theater plays and roles.

-Using theater in the classroom introduce children into art and history.

Some of these ideas are from a very interesting blog I found called Tiching Blog and I recommend you to take it a look. Here is the link http://blog.tiching.com/el-teatro-una-herramienta-mas-en-el-aula/

In my opinion we should use more theatre in class and body language because it has a lot of advantage we can use in many different ways. It was very nice to do all those activities and think how we could adapt them to a literature class. I enjoyed so much the lesson, the hours flied and I learnt a lot.

This post comes a bit late, but I hope you can enjoy it as the rest that I have written, or even more

I have to say as well that it is the last post we have to make for this subject and, for this reason, I would like to do a little summary about the things I have learnt and I liked the most in this semester.

We started the subject with some content based things that we should now like the difference between phonetics and phonology, the meaning of literacy or the dimensions of literacy, but very soon we went into more practical activities in which we practice by ourselves the things we were learning.

I am sure that all or nearly all of my classmates can remember the “Chocolate cake” video of Michael Rosen, or the different versions of Cinderella (we even created a “map” with our own version), or the storytelling each group in our class created.

We also had some lessons in which we were responsible of creating activities with a QR code, a Glogster or even dress ourselves as one of the characters of Aladdin’s film because some students from a school had to come and we had to teach them some contents using the film.

People can think “well, you were just having fun in your lessons, but you did not learn anything”. And my answer to this is: you really do not know how good is to learn things at the same time as you are having fun with your teacher and your classmates.

I can say now, at the end of the semester, that I have learnt a lot of new things and I am also sure that my classmates and I are full of new resources, techniques, activities, contents and so on to face English Literature in our future lessons with Primary Students.

Just to finish with, I would like to say that my feelings about this last post are very different: on one hand I feel a bit more free now because I have felt a bit stress with all the projects we had to do, not only in this subject, but on the other hand, every time I look into the past (recent past) the things that I remember the most are the good moments I had as I was working on these projects and how many things I can do now that I could not do before.

Thank you very much for visiting!

Teachers have the responsibility to avoid this so we can work with types of poems.

There are different types of poems that we can use in class for work poetry in a different way and children will have the opportunity to enjoy working with poems.

In this post, I want to show you some examples of poems to work with them in English and activities for motivate children and make easier for them:

This is a type of poetry where the first letter of each line form a word. This type is easy for children when they have to create a poem because they think a Word and then Little by Little they form their poem writing things related with the word. An example:

Crisp and colorful
Adorable and crunchy
Nice and tasty
Delicious and tempting
Yummy and best

Autobiographical :

This is an easy way of write poems for children because they have to introduce themselves and write about their likes, hobbies or feelings . An example :

I’m a Jilly Joe
I love to sail and row
I love flying kites
only to end up with fights
My friends hate me
For I’m a wannabe
I love myself
For I’m Jilly Joe

Color poems

In this type, children have to think in a color and write objects or characters of the color.

White is the milk
As tasty as could be.
White are the clouds
Like cotton balls in the sky.
So is the light white
That brightens my day

Calligram

This is one of the most motivating and easy type of poems for children. They have to draw something and write things about the drawings in order to make the form of the drawing. For children is easy because they only have to write simple words. This is perfect to work a specific topic in English and learn new vocabulary for children.

With this types of poems you will have the opportunity to work with poem and with English structures or vocabulary at the same time and for children these activities are motivating and they enjoy working in class.

You can think about specific activities to do with each poem and make challenges for children so be creative in your class!!!

First of all we created new characters, creatures that are related to us and have some of our characteristics, or maybe not, maybe it’s our antagonist but all of them have something special that have been created starting from our imagination and they have a little bit of magic on them. After creating this magic, malicious, benevolent, hero we have mixed it with all the characters created by our mates; then we made groups of 5 – 6 people and then we picked again other characters different to the ones that we have created, so we have new ones.

Later on we will have to create and develop a story with those characters to create a poster for our new movie and then sell it to someone who will be interested on bringing our story to the big screen. We will see the results this week…

As a result of this activity, I was thinking on different ways to translate this to our future classrooms

and which has first come to my mind is “the traveller book” I’m sure most of you know what is this but for the ones who don’t know it… Is a book in which the students create their own story we can begin it in white or we can give them the beginning of the story, after that one of our pupils is going to take the book to its house to continue the story with the help of his parents. The main aim is that the students create a new page for the common story but taking into account what was written first to give the story the sense it has to have.

This could be another way to make our students create their own story and being creative and motivate moreover the attendant of the book could read the new part of the story on Mondays and the rest of the class could draw a picture based on its mates part of the story and then select one of the pictures from all and paste it in the book to make it funnier.

Could you imagine other activities like this to create collaborative and cooperative stories or books? I would be pleased of reading your comments and thanks for your attention.

This project consisted on the creation of a twenty minutes workshop focus on one topic and with a special context, the story of Aladdin.

Firstly I am going to talk about the preparation of these kind projects. I have to said that although prepare activities for twenty minutes look very easy, we have to take into account that this activities should be significant. It means, for me it has not sense prepare activities just for spend time. Significant learning should be included. Furthermore we wanted to include the use of ICTs and it gave an extra difficulty to the preparation. The reason was that we had to take into account the level of the students and the possibility of have technical problems, such as internet problems. In addition, this preparation also included the creation of a catchy environment. For me it was the hardest and the funniest part of the project. The hardest because we created a “jaima” in the class and we had to bring a lot of very heavy material such as carpets. The funnies because, although we spent a lot of time, we enjoyed a lot the process.

Moreover the day of the workshop was very different of what I though. Improvisation is the best word to define my feelings of this day. For example, during the first performance we ran a lot to achieve the time, but suddenly we discovered that we had ten minutes more. In this time we started to include new element such a choreography that we have prepared for be done just by us. Also in other performances the time was shorter, and we had to delete some activities from our plans.

But finally the results were unbeatable. I am really proud of what we did, and also I think that I learned a lot from this experience. Now I fell that I am more prepare for the management of student, for the inclusion of literature elements in the workshops, for the control of the time of the activities and my self-confident with students has grown since this moment.

In conclusion I fell satisfied. And as this is probably my last post I will like to say good bye and mention that it was a pleasure shared my posts with all of you.

Hi everyone! I would like to write about the results and the feelings that we had in our workshop. Starting from the beginning our market had a lack of activity, but in the presentation of all of the class, all of you gave us a very good feedback and ideas to improve our market.

Well, we created a market in the corridor, I have to say that it was one of the worst place to located a workshop because is the place where all the students pass, and with the children, we were doing activities in the floor of the corridor and the adults had to trough between them and we thought that a good place to located the workshop is in a class, But finally we solved the problems very well.

I think that all my class were very motivated, the dress up were fantastic, there was some of the workshop that create a great performance, and the consequences were that all the children were very happy and when they finished all of them said that they would like to come more days, because they had fun and learnt.

Our workshop was divided in two parts, the first one we tell them about the context of our workshop and give to them some coins to exchange it for food, then with their food selected had to fill a empty pyramid of food with their food that were selected before and order in the correct way, then we showed them a pyramid of food and check how they put their food, almost all the groups had a clear idea of the order of the pyramid of food. The second part of the workshop we had created and activities with the tablets, and they had to create in groups a menu for the sultan. They were very motivated and also they like to much to use tablets, Alejandro us a sultan check their menus and see what they have learnt and gave to them some feedbacks, in order to let them know some mistakes.

To conclude this post, I have to say that we had a great experience with the children, and as a future teachers we should do things like this for our students to challenge them.

Thanks for reading

I have written since I can remember. Sometimes I just let my imagination take me wherever it wanted to go, and wrote until my eyelids dropped. Other times, I had to push myself in order to get something readable that met the established criteria for a given task. But every time, I did my best to make it work.

A few weeks ago, our teacher asked us to create a Fairy Tale Character. Yes! I thought. That was possibly the best chore I had this semester. She provided us with a template (included below) that we had to use to make this character as real as possible. We were required to create the psychological aspects of the characters, more than the usual physical descriptions. And depending on how comfortable students felt about dealing with feelings, some of us were thrilled to bits, while others thought OMG! How are we going to do this?

And here is the point. Creating a character requires, and deserves, a level of commitment that transforms the task into something serious. You need to be able to put yourself on your character’s shoes, and the last item of the template (Your personal connection with the character), allowed me to think that it could have a further use, such as including our characters in a story. In the end, if you have created them, who could understand them better than yourself?

But that wasn’t the case. This week, the teacher told us that we would be required to write, in groups of four or five people, the plot of a story, using characters created by others. It made everything much more difficult and challenging. What if the creators of Alexiah, Mr. Fitman, Guffita or Wickedmore (the characters my group had to include in our story) don’t like what we have done with them? That was my biggest fear when we started working on the project.

Now the project is almost done, and we have to present it to the rest of the class. I wonder what would be left of the character I create. I know how she thinks, I know what she wants. Will she behave the way I expect? I will have the chance to check it next Tuesday. I can’t wait.

I have to confess that at the beginning I was a little bit scared about it, because during my scholar life I had never been really fond of literature. I loved reading and knowing by myself, but I struggled with the academic aspect. It is true that during the degree, we had other subjects about children’s literature; however, this one has been the key to change my mind completely (imagine how much it affected on me that I am going to take my Final Dissertation about one of its contents! ). Thanks to this subject I have discovered that there are not complex content, but wrong ways to approach or teach them.

Another of the most valuable things that I have learnt from this subject, apart from myriad of resources, materials and great techniques, is that we must teach how to love and enjoy literature instead of how to memorise thousands of data. Doing so, our pupils will achieve a much more meaningful learning.

Maybe this last entry should be devoted to reflect about everything we have learnt along the subject (which is not little) as I was doing a few lines above. However I could not leave without sharing with you one last thing I met a few weeks ago and found it very interesting, especially after what has been occurring recently:  Racist overtones in Disney’s stories.

In words of Rebecca Rabison (2008) “most of the Disney story lines are about people who are white” (p.71). This fact, as Morawski or Harris (cited by Rabison, 2008) explained, has a clear connection with “United states’ political and representational systems that implicate ‘white’ as the national American identity and normalize white people and their behaviour” (pp. 71-72). In fact, taking into account the explanations of Fine (cited by Rabison, 2008) this situation has gone beyond, transmitting as a result a clear connection between the Whiteness concept with others such as objectivity, normality, truth, knowledge, merit…

In the case of the stories which are based just in a “white world” with only white characters, without any choice criminals are also white. That can then lead us to think that “crime is represented as largely unrelated to race” (Rabison, 2008, p. 73).

However, although they are just a few, there are also some exceptions in which non-white characters are included. When it happens, as Rabison (2008) describes, this exceptions to Disney prototypes (people of colour) “are portrayed using racial [and negative] stereotypes” (p. 73); whereas white ones are glorified (2008). Bearing in mind that information, everyone can deduce what it actually ensues: “the criminals in these Disney films are the people from non-white races”, which are commonly chastised by the white ones. (Rabison, 2008, p.73).

Furthermore Giroux (cited by Rabison, 2008) argues that as a result of it, representations and codes which taught that “cultural differences [which differ from] the imprint of white (…) are deviant, inferior, unintelligent, and a threat to be overcome”, are been given to children (p.74). In other words it “suggests to children that people of colour are inherently criminal” (Rabison, 2008, p.78).

Different and clear examples of this situation which are provided by the same author (2008) are the following ones:

In lots of Disney stories, as it happen in Pinocchio (1940), villains are represented with darker skin and hair, as well as with a strong accent (Stromboli, in the previously mentioned story), whereas good characters (Geppetto) are characterised by light skin and hair and softer face features.

http://es.disney.wikia.com

Similarly occurs in Aladdin (1992), in which although all the characters belong to the Arabian culture, Jafar is strongly characterised with Arabic features (almond-shaped and ripped eyes, bulbous noses, long beards, and a strong accent) while Aladdin “appears ‘Americanized’” (Giroux, cited by Rabison, 2008, p.75) with lighter skin, small nose, no accent…

http://www.destructoid.com

Finally another example appeared in the Lady and the Tramp (1955). In this case is the Asian culture the one that is racially portrait through two cruel, sly, greedy and criminal Siamese cats, completely different from the other animals which belong to high class, have good morals, and speak with Western, British and American accents. (Rabison, 2008)

http://www.filmwerk.co.uk

I would like to conclude by saying that my purpose devoting the last entry to this topic, was simply to transmit you the importance and necessity of carrying out an extremely carefully analysis, not only of those stories that have been part of us since our infancy, but of every single story we will offer to our future pupils, paying special attention to those messages related with stereotypes that can have such a big influence on them.

I am sure you will do your best bilingual teachers

Sincerelly,

Azu

P.S: Good luck for all the experiences that we will soon begin to live

Rabison, R. C. (2008). Deviance in Disney: Representations of Crime in Disney Films, A Qualitative Analysis. Honors Theses, 148.

For the activity that we designed we were all dressed-up as characters from Aladdin’s film. And the plot of our activity begins by the time the Genie comes back from his trip around the world. Then in the activity the Genie appears with loads of presents that he took for Aladdin and Jasmine. During the activity children have to classify all the presents that the Genie bring for them depending on the country that the presents came from and by the time they finish it they have to define the route that the Genie follow during his holidays around the world.

It was a really fun and interesting project in which all of us learnt and had a great time, although it would be hard to say who enjoyed it more; the children or us.

Secondly I´m going to talk about the THEATRE activity that we did this week, which personally I think that it has loads of possibilities.

As I’ve just said, during this week we used the theatre as a tool for bringing English to students in a motivational way. Now I’m going to explain some of them.

For the first activity there need to be at least two pairs of people. The members of each pair have to be sitting in a single line and the one that is behind has to pretend that his arms are his partner´s arms. So once the two pairs are prepared, they will have to play a role such as pretending to be in a job interview, while the audience (the rest of the class) asks them questions.

In addition, in the next activity the students will form groups of four to six people. Then, two of them will be playing a role in which they are friends and for example, they are talking about the last holidays of one of them. While they are speaking the rest of the group members have to perform what the others are saying.

In conclusion, I think that these two activities can easily be done with primary students and also, they can be used as a cross-curricular activity, in order to review and learn almost every topic that they study at class in any other subject.