During this week, we have been working on telling stories strategies. I have discovered that we have different methods to work on the same story.
On one hand, we can divide the characters between the students. I think this is a very motivational method because the students can feel involve in the story, and in my opinion it achieves the whole attention of our students. However, I also think that this technique just works if the story is full of characters, because if not, just some pupils can participate. Another problem is that if we ask for volunteers, probably the shyest pupils will never participate.
On the other hand, we can choose other method to tell story. We can use the “Kong Fu” way. It consist in remarking with a Kong Fu sound and movement each punctuation mark. In any case we can use another system sounds taking into account the preferences of our students. Nevertheless in my opinion this way is not the best, I think this is just good to focus on punctuation marks and intonation, never to work on the content of the story.
Finally, we have seen another strategy that is my favorite one. This one works including a contextualizing gesture for each significant word. I think it is brilliant to deal with CLIL, because you don’t need to be very concentrated in the text to understand the content, but in any case you can relate easily each word to the meanings. Also I think that is great because as the whole class can participate, the involvement is bigger, and with this kind of activities the shyest students have the opportunity to develop other skills.
Another interesting think that we have been investigating during the last week were the stories that involve a curricular content. I have found some interesting stories to deal with in CLIL classes. Not all of the contents that they treat are involved in the curriculum, but in any case the can be very useful.
Here I leave you the titles and the basic information, I hope you like it.
-The hungry caterpillar by Eric Carle (about butterflies´ cycle)
-Polar Bear, Polar Bear by Eric Carle and Bill Martin (about different animals and respect)
-Does a Kangaroo have a Mother, too? By Eric Carle (about animals´ habitat, feed and family)
-The rainbow snake, which is an Australian Aboriginal myth (about Australia, other cultures and myths and legends)
Thank you for readme
References:
Ioannou-Georgiou, S., & Ramírez Verdugo, M. D. (27 de 09 de 2014). Stories as a tool for teaching and learning in CLIL. Recuperado el 27 de 09 de 2014, de http://www.schools.ac.cy/klimakio/Themata/Anglika/conf_semin_workshops/Stories_ioannougeorgioudoloresramirez.pdf
Hello Carla, I have read your post and I totally agree with your different opinions about the strategies for making storytelling motivational and useful. My favorite point of your post is that you care about shy students; that´s because I used to be one of them when I was at school.
According to developing new strategies to make any children participate in story telling activities, I may suggest that it would be useful to choose specific stories that don´t really need a big amount of characters, but it must include very interactive dialogues between the characters so that children forget their shyness because they are sharing their confidence with their partners.
However, talking about introducing gestures in a story, I can say that I find it very interactive for children, but to ensure that they learn and keep their motivation, it would be necessary to introduce some scaffolding techniques, so that, the students can learn it in an easier way. In addition, the contents included in this story must be educational and should appear in the curriculum if it is possible.
Finally I have to say that I really liked writing this comment on your post and it would be very interesting to read more of your opinions on the blog. Good job!
Hi Jaime, thank you for comment on my post. I just want to tell you that in addition of your comment, I heard a great strategy to avoid the shyness that we can combine with the telling stories strategies. This method consist on create little groups; with this we are reducing the amount of spectators, and also the environmental tension.
Thank you again
Carla, it is great you found the storytelling session interesting. It is important to be more specific when talking about methodology. For example, instead of using ‘way’ is better to say technique, method or strategy, when appropriate. Let me clarify that the techniques you mention can be used at the same time. You can use choral speaking together with KUngfu punctuation, for example. This is great as you can combine them and provide students with more or less scaffolding. Also,keep an eye on your syntax and check missing -ing forms in your text. Keep on working hard