Hi wonders!

During the previous weeks the class has been working on a specific feature related to Aladdin’s film. We had to create a workshop for 9 years old students from Daoiz y Velarde School (Alcalá de Henares). Our group chose the Cave of Wonders scene when Aladdin enters to the cave of wonders and he finds all wonders such as gold, the magical carpet… everything students had ever seen before. For this, we wanted to decorate the class as it was a cave covering all the chairs and tables with continuos paper, carpets and cushions were placed on the floor where the students could be seated, also we put tables full of chocolate coins, everything with the purpose of creating an Arabian ambience.

In addition to the decoration, the group disguised itself of the different characters from the film: Aladdin, Jasmine, Jafar, Genie, Rajah, and Abu. The children were spell bounded when they saw us and immediately they recognised which character we were. So with that, let’s start talking about the procedure!

To begin with the workshop, Aladdin was outside the classroom (Cave of Wonders) pretending to be meditating while children were getting closer with Abu who was asking: ‘Do you know who is this character?’. So Aladdin asked them to enter to the CAVE OF WONDERS. Once inside, students bumped into the Genie character who carried out the ‘wishes activity’. In which consisted the ‘wish activity’?. The Genie was calling student by student so that students told their own wish: ‘I wish…’ ‘I wish to be a…’. Once the Genie had all the wishes he kept them. After, we did the following activity using the interactive whiteboard and the program ‘Netbook’. It consisted in giving some messy sentences and children had to be placing them. After this, we played the trailer of Aladdin to remember the film, scenes, landscapes, characters… Later, we played the game ‘Who am I?. The activity consisted in being placed by pairs, the teachers put a drawing-flashcard of the character on the forehead of the student. They couldn’t see their own character so that they had to guess it. You can see it here:

They had to ask: ‘Have I a long hair?’, ‘Am I a man?’, ‘Have I feathers?. The other pair had to answer yes/no. We thought that scaffolding here could be provided, so we made some lists of adjectives, objects and parts of the body related to the characters in order to help students to have more flexibility and fluency to talk and describe the character, as you can see here:

Once they could guess their character, we passed into the last activity.

The aim of the last activity ‘Cartoonist‘ was to create the character children wanted. For example, to build the body of Aladdin he had divided the character into the parts of the body (head, arms, legs…). Like this:

Children had to join all the parts in order to create the new character. By the way, there were helped by this sheet that they had to follow:

On the head there was an empty face where students could put behind the poster’s character and take a photo, pretending the student was this character. And finally, we gave them medals, chocolate coins… and so on with the next three groups!

I hope ýou enjoyed the workshop!