Experts in Children’s literature: Maurice Sendak
Hello everyone, this week I’m writing about a new activity that we have developed during this week. We can call this activity as Groups of Experts in Children’s literature. To complete the activity, first we have to form small groups, and then the teacher gave to each group the name of a Children’s literature Author. After that, each group had to prepare a short display in which they explain who the authors were, what they did and why are they important.
My group had to work about Maurice Sendak. We learned the basic details of his life and work, such as the fact that he lived during the holocaust and the Lindbergh kidnapping case, due to those facts his works had a gloomy atmosphere. His most popular work is “Where the wild things are”, which has sold over 19 million copies and there is also a movie about the story.
After doing this group activity, I realized that this is the perfect activity that can be done with children, if we adapt the topic and the task of the activity for one that is related with any of the subjects that are taught at school, such as science. The reason why it can be so great is because it has lots of characteristics which make it ideal for children, for instance, it makes students work in groups, so that, they can develop a cooperative learning activity, in which they create their own knowledge. In addition, this activity is also highly related with CLIL because they can learn the content by using English as a tool for developing the content. Furthermore, this activity also makes students share what they have learnt to the rest of their peers and finally for making them feel more interested in the activity we can offer them the possibility to assess their classmates displays with a sheet of paper that can give feedback to the teacher and to their partners.
In conclusion, I can say that all these activities that we are doing during the different weeks, are not just for us to learn content about authors. Their main aim is to provide us with new and creative ideas that we may use in the future with our students. As a personal task, I will think about the different activities that we are doing in classes, which are also adaptable for children.