My first post it is about reading when we were kids. May be, nowadays most of you don’t remember or don’t have lot of memories related with reading when you were little, but I am sure that if you start thinking about it at list you will have one memory.

For some of you, reading would be one of the funniest or more interesting things in your lives just because you had the opportunity to read good books or may be because someone made it amusing for you. But I am sure that for others reading was not such an entertaining thing…

During my live I had the opportunity to see different cases of children that really hate reading; the first one was my own case. When I started to read it was funny for me, but little by little I saw that everyone improved their reading skills and I still had problems with the comprehension or with the fluency. My teachers were always telling me that I didn’t know how to read and that I had never pay attention so that’s why I started to feel frustrated and there were a couple of years that for me, reading was like a nightmare until my aunt bought me the book of “The little prince” and she started to read with me.

Now, in the university when I was doing my practicum in the schools I also have seen children with reading problems but the difference it is that nowadays teachers are aware of that kind of problems and they pay more attention to them trying to avoid that feeling of inferiority.

I decided to write about it because the other day we were thinking about our reading memories and I could feel again that even now, I sometimes think that I hate reading because I don’t do it well, but after the class I thought about so many questions like: What would happen if someone helped me before? What would happen if I didn’t have that teacher? If my aunt didn’t help me, I still have reading problems?

Anyway as future teacher we should pay attention to the reading process of our future pupils and of course their difficulties and problems because not all of them are going to learn as fast as we want.

Try to make them feel like an important part of the book!

First, we took some videos of Michael Rosen, who is an English children’s novelist, as a good example of storytelling. Then we analyze curiously the characteristics that made Rosen´s stories catchy for children and even for adults. We conclude that there are plenty of things that make his stories so attractive, such as the repetition of grammatical structures and vocabulary, the mystery included in his stories, the first-person narration and all the gestures, voice intonations, noises and funny things that make the auditor feel involved by the story and its characters.

After this analysis, we thought about new innovative ideas that could improve Rosen´s story according to CLIL. Finally we thought about some useful ideas, for instance, it would be motivating to activate the children´s prior-knowledge by asking them if they like chocolate cakes, or what would they do if they were the protagonist of the story. Moreover it would be eye-catching to introduce pictures, visuals, encouraging them to repeat the body language of Rosen and pre-teaching some of the difficult vocabulary words that appear in the story.

Although we proposed some great ideas, the teacher showed us more ideas to create extra tasks for each story. The one that I really liked was called “Kung Fu Punctuation Poster” it consisted in practicing some different Kung Fu techniques in the air while reading the story, but they have to do a specific melee attack depending on the punctuation mark that they´ve just read. For example, each time that they had to stop reading due to a dot, they have to punch the air while saying “ha”.

We also saw another model of story in which for every action and noun that appear in the story the students have to imitate the gestures that the teacher does, so that it could be more attractive for the students.

 Finally, the teacher told us to create our own story using the previous one as a model, so that, every group could prepare a different story but using the same structure, we have to develop our own gestures for the different verbs, adjectives and nouns of the story and try to link it to other subjects apart from English in order to make the story educational.

 So next week I will write about how the activity resulted in class.

Michael Rosen´s chocolate cake story

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BxQLITdOOc

Kung Fu Punctuation Poster:

http://displays.tpet.co.uk/?resource=1264#/ViewResource/id1264

Jaime García

Twenty years ago, we only learnt English using books and practising with some exercises filling the gaps.

Fortunately, that methodology has changed or it is changing. Have you ever heard about Jolly phonics’ method?

Jolly phonics is a fun and child centred approach to teaching literacy through synthetic phonics using actions and gestures for each of the forty two letters sounds. It is very motivating for children and teachers who can see their students achieve. The letters sound are split into seven groups according to the frequency we use them and its difficulty of learning.

Looking for information about Jolly phonics, I have found a lot of interesting investigations. Coral George (2012), verified that learning through Jolly phonics, students get better in one year the average level of reading and grammar compared to other students with the same age. Dr. Martynne is also agree with Coral George’s argument.

Another research work that I have found interesting is the idea of Yagüe del Real (2012), who is the headmaster of the Eurocolegio Casvi. He supports that Jolly phonics complent and improve the traditional method of learning English used during this decades. He believes that this approach helps to solve some common mistakes in pronunciation or fluency that spanish people have when they are adquiring the foreign language.

Related with the methodology and schedule the seven groups are divided into two groups: the first five are recommended for the first grade meanwhile the last two and the tricky words for the second grade.

According to these research lines and based on my opinion I found this purpose quite interesting,

but what do you think? Do you think that this division is the correct one? Would you do it in a different way?

Maybe, would it be better to teach all the sounds in the first grade and review them in the second grade? Do you think that Jolly phonics can be used in the other grades?

because it has a lot of advantages like the motivational part for our students due to their improvement their pronunciation and their reading. But i also found some disadvantages like the time that we have to spend to learn each sound and the level of each student.