Hi, today I’m writing about an activity that we did last week and I consider it as a great activity that can have loads of possibilities.
The activity is called “Create your reading map”. It consists in creating a drawing by using your imagination in order to transmit an idea or a story.
In class, first we practice doing one in common. We represented the story of Cinderella; one by one we were adding steps to the story until we finished the whole story. Then the teacher proposed us to do another reading map, but it had to be done individually and the topic was “the evolution of reading in our lives”.
By the time we finished this activity we showed our drawings to the rest of the class and in pairs we discussed about their meaning and so on. Furthermore, I can say that I found this activity very useful for remembering how my reading skills and likes were changing through my life and the fact of doing it by this way made it much more interesting, so I wondered if this kind of activity can be used in other circumstances.
However, I´ve been thinking about it and the main points that involve this type of activity are: assessment, reviewing, cross-curricular and visual-spacial intelligence.
For instance, if teachers show this kind of activity to their pupils, and connect it with assessment and reviewing with an example, children may feel attracted with the idea of creating their own reading maps, so that, they can check their knowledge of the content in a more dynamic way. Nevertheless, if we think about multiple intelligences, this idea will be especially beneficial for those children whose visual-spacial intelligence is more developed and who prefer to study using a visual learning style.
In addition, to improve this activity, it would be easy to link it with other subjects apart from English, and make this activity a cross curricular one.
In a nutshell, as I’ve already said this activity can be used in an unlimited different ways, it also can be involve more than one subject as a cross curricular task and it can be helpful for children, mainly for those who prefer to study using a visual-spacial learning style.
I hope you liked my post and if anybody has a picture of his reading map, it would be grateful to paste it in your comments.
http://www.mindmapart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Space-Reading-Mind-Map.gif
Good morning Jaime! I decided to comment your post because it was an activity really interesting for me and, as you said, very useful too. I think it´s a wonderful activity to develop in primary classroom, because of the cross-curricular and visual learning you have mentioned, but because is like a small competition that let the students show what they have read and their personal feelings about each book. In addition, with this activity children have the opportunity to share whit all his or her mates their personal experiences. It is probably that children have read the same books but never will make them feel the same things, so we are starting a literary dialogue between them, what it´s great! Because of that, I think, the main part of this work is the communicative one. The moment in what everybody share and listen to the others. Learning from them, and picking some ideas or some books to read before. This project encourage me to read some books that my partners drew in their maps, so I think this will have the same effect in children. The only thing is that we have to make some scaffolding to help them to do it properly, like Raquel said. Dividing the steps before, putting some limits like the number of books… In my opinion, it is a perfect activity to know more about our students and, of course, to encourage them to read more too.