Hello, I´m Jaime and this week I´m writing about two activities that we have done during the two previous weeks. The first one is called Aladdin´s workshop. It consisted in creating an activity related with Aladdin´s Disney film for children of 4th of primary in small groups. Nevertheless, what make this activity special is that it became REAL! This is it because our teacher managed to take a class of 4th year primary students from a nearby school to our class.
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.
Good morning Jaime! I have to say that your post have wake me up lots of positive feelings. Because of that I decide to comment you. Talking about the Aladdin´s activity I really would like to have the possibility to be there, as another child in each of my partners’ workshop. Yours sounds very fun and very interactive. In my opinion the task that children had to choose and pick the object that the Genie bring of the different countries seems really nice. But, like you have said, this project has been very useful for us. Because it is difficult to find opportunities to enface situations in which children were our public. And I think we all have realize that working with children everything can happen. I am not talking only about the control of the time, I am talking about lots of unexpected things that could happen.
According to the theatre activity you have mentioned. I didn´t do it yet but I´m looking forward to have that class. Because some others classmates told me about that activity and so much they enjoy during the lesson.
Apart from this, I think we all did a good job with Aladdin´s workshops and what I said before. I would have liked to be there. =)
Hi Jaime, I decided to comment on your post because it reminded me how funny was performance Beyoncé with my voice and your corporal expression in the “theater activity”. I have to realize that although I did this activity when I was younger, I did not make the link with the didactic possibilities before that day.
Moreover, according with the Aladdin´s workshop I would like to mention that the idea of work on the Genie´s travel was great. With this context you got the possibility of work on geography and different cultures in a very motivated and catchy way. As a suggestion, as you were working with the geographical aspects, I think that in the future you could include the original version of Aladdin (the Asiatic context), but anyway, brilliant idea.
Carla