First of all we created new characters, creatures that are related to us and have some of our characteristics, or maybe not, maybe it’s our antagonist but all of them have something special that have been created starting from our imagination and they have a little bit of magic on them. After creating this magic, malicious, benevolent, hero we have mixed it with all the characters created by our mates; then we made groups of 5 – 6 people and then we picked again other characters different to the ones that we have created, so we have new ones.

Later on we will have to create and develop a story with those characters to create a poster for our new movie and then sell it to someone who will be interested on bringing our story to the big screen. We will see the results this week…

As a result of this activity, I was thinking on different ways to translate this to our future classrooms

and which has first come to my mind is “the traveller book” I’m sure most of you know what is this but for the ones who don’t know it… Is a book in which the students create their own story we can begin it in white or we can give them the beginning of the story, after that one of our pupils is going to take the book to its house to continue the story with the help of his parents. The main aim is that the students create a new page for the common story but taking into account what was written first to give the story the sense it has to have.

This could be another way to make our students create their own story and being creative and motivate moreover the attendant of the book could read the new part of the story on Mondays and the rest of the class could draw a picture based on its mates part of the story and then select one of the pictures from all and paste it in the book to make it funnier.

Could you imagine other activities like this to create collaborative and cooperative stories or books? I would be pleased of reading your comments and thanks for your attention.

I have written since I can remember. Sometimes I just let my imagination take me wherever it wanted to go, and wrote until my eyelids dropped. Other times, I had to push myself in order to get something readable that met the established criteria for a given task. But every time, I did my best to make it work.

A few weeks ago, our teacher asked us to create a Fairy Tale Character. Yes! I thought. That was possibly the best chore I had this semester. She provided us with a template (included below) that we had to use to make this character as real as possible. We were required to create the psychological aspects of the characters, more than the usual physical descriptions. And depending on how comfortable students felt about dealing with feelings, some of us were thrilled to bits, while others thought OMG! How are we going to do this?

And here is the point. Creating a character requires, and deserves, a level of commitment that transforms the task into something serious. You need to be able to put yourself on your character’s shoes, and the last item of the template (Your personal connection with the character), allowed me to think that it could have a further use, such as including our characters in a story. In the end, if you have created them, who could understand them better than yourself?

But that wasn’t the case. This week, the teacher told us that we would be required to write, in groups of four or five people, the plot of a story, using characters created by others. It made everything much more difficult and challenging. What if the creators of Alexiah, Mr. Fitman, Guffita or Wickedmore (the characters my group had to include in our story) don’t like what we have done with them? That was my biggest fear when we started working on the project.

Now the project is almost done, and we have to present it to the rest of the class. I wonder what would be left of the character I create. I know how she thinks, I know what she wants. Will she behave the way I expect? I will have the chance to check it next Tuesday. I can’t wait.

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.

On Monday, our teacher prepared new activities for us that were linked with poetry. The first activity that we did had a close relation with new technologies. In this activity, first we were divided in small groups of four or three people, then we had to search on YouTube for the poetry videos that we did and choose one of them.
They can be watched in this direction: (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdrzI70O2odaLe7LN52gX7Q)

After choosing, we had to create a QR code for the video that we had chosen using the website: https://www.the-qrcode-generator.com/. Once we had the QR code ready; we started to think about an activity that can be done with the video that we have chosen, such as adding a new strophe or drawing objects that appear or should appear in the poetry, etc. You may think about the purpose of this activity; the aim of the activity was to print the QR codes with the activities suggested and place them in the corridors of the university, so that people could do the activities that we created thanks to their smartphone´s camera.

By the time we finished the activity we started with the next one which was linked with creation, art and visual spatial intelligence. The activity began when the teacher place in different parts of the class some sheets with a poetry in them, but this poetries had a special characteristic; its verses form shapes of objects that were related with them. We had to go read each sheet and create another example using the technique which appears in the sheet.

In conclusion, I have to say that I really liked the activities that we did, because they gave the opportunity to develop imagination and creativity, also they were motivational for us and they would be motivational for children as well, but a very interesting point that the activities suggested is the sense of continuity, I mean that the videos that we did some weeks ago have been used again for another activity. Furthermore, I think that this could be used in some many ways in schools for letting the children create a visible progression in the continuity of the activities that they do.

As a consequence of the previous ideas, if we bear in mind the didactic implications of this conception, some of us have a lack of confidence in teaching poetry.  Because of these reasons, lessons such as the one that we had in the subject Children’s Literature in English, can be quite useful to improve our literature didactic skills.  During the first part of the lesson, we knew some interesting and useful websites to introduce poetry to our future students. And we prepared a poem performance in groups. It was a fantastic approach to know more about teaching and learning poetry.

From then on, I decided to make some research on the teaching of poetry and I found a source that could be useful for us:

The Poetry Trust, according to its official website, is “one of the UK’s flagship poetry organizations, delivering a year-round live and digital program, creative education opportunities, courses, prizes and publications”.

One of the most interesting publications of this organization is  The Poetry Toolkit (foolproof recipes for teaching poetry in the classroom). It is a guide with lots of activities and didactic possibilities that can be applied in the classroom. Besides, this document reflects on how hard it can be for teachers and students to understand poetry. It also encourage teachers to try the proposed activities by themselves, before they use these ones in their work with students. The main aim is that teachers gain an idea of the nature of each task and its possibilities.

An interesting activity designed by Amanda Dalton is Poem Jigsaws (Choosing the right word). To develop this activity, we provide pairs of students with a poem that has been cut up into words that they have to put together again as they want. The aim of the activity is not based on reconstruct the original composition, but to create something new and original. Through this task we help our students to understand some features of poetry such as: word order, syntax and language.

Due to the fact that we, as future teachers, should try these activities, I prepared my own Poem Jigsaw using a sample of the poem A Birthday written by Christina G. Rosetti:

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickest fruit;

Set of words that belongs to the original poem A Birthday.

Final result: a Poem Jigsaw.

In the described publication there are much more interesting activities that we can use with pupils. I recommend you to read this useful publication and to do other new activities.  

In this post I am going to talk about the activity we carried out the last Monday at class. This one was related to a previous one in which we had to learn by heart one specific poem and then record ourselves by performing it. Therefore, the activity we did at class was an enjoyable way of putting into practice “how to recycle previous activities”.

To begin with, the teacher asked us to look for the video we recorded the previous time in internet. Then, we had to choose one of the videos our classmates produced in order to start working on and finally, we had to design one task related to that video in order to make students participate by interacting with the video.

The poem we selected talked about anything that you can collect anywhere. Because of that, we designed an activity in which children had to create three different verses about anything that they can collect anywhere and add them to the poem. This way they have a clear grammar scaffolding, but also they can use their imagination and to feel themselves as great poets.

In my opinion, these type of activities are very creative and fun for children. You can forget about teaching them poetry only by introducing them well known writers or make them learning by heart one specific poem and recite it in front of the class. These type of strategies are a little bit strict and bored. With these last you don’t offer them the opportunity of make them reflect on  what writers are inspired of when they create, or what kind of feeling they usually manage at the end, when they publish poems. However, if you sometimes make them put in some poet shoes and ask them to create something new, a current adaptation of a Becquer poem or to stick images around a poem in order to provide a visual support of what they understand, they can realize of the great work a “simple” poem takes and the meaning it could has for them, then for humanity. Moreover, it is recycled, so you can get the most of previous tasks to realise new ones. You have not to think too much.

Lastly, our future pupils are mainly children. They don’t understand about learning by heart or reciting but they know how to play, so why don’t let them play? The use of these type of strategies could mean a different and a better way of learning in which children could explore, evaluate their possibilities and create something fresh.

Is the first time that we have the chance to work with pupils in the university, we sometimes see other groups of mates working with pupils and I have to say that I felt a little bit jealous but now we are the ones that have this challenge.

In class we were deciding which film we were going to deal with and we have had very good options as “The lord of the rings”, “The book of the jungle”, “Mary Poppins”, “Aladdin” and others. So we have to vote the ones that we liked the most and the thing was so equal between “the book of the jungle” and “Aladdin” however “Aladdin” wins. At first sight was a little bit difficult to find the didactic porpoise of this film but as the time goes by every group was thinking on the different things we could teach with this incredible film. After that we presented our topics to the rest of the mates and they told as some advices about where to place the different groups and also other topics that we can relate with the one we have chosen.

Moreover I didn´t remember the film very well so that day in the afternoon I was watching the film to see all the scenes and how funny the Gini was, the next day in my group we were all singing the songs that are displayed in the film, how anybody can remember the songs that well, but my mates did it; now I´m all the time singing it.

I would never imagine doing this at the university, but in my opinion is a very good way to practice for our future jobs, and also for being more prepared and being more involved in the task. I´m so enthusiastic, I count the days to do it and to see all of as dress up like all the characters in the film and also how you we all decorate the university. I hope you are also enjoying with this task. I would like to know what do you think about it and how do you feel?

Do you think we could adapt Disney films to explain science and other subjects to our students?

Source: tumblr.com

 As I am sure that, as current and future teachers, we should encourage our students and kids to read and show them how many benefits reading has, I would like to share with you the two activities we carried out at the library that I liked the most and I believe that they were useful on promoting us to read:

On the one hand, the “Making a story up”, an activity that consisted on playing in groups with different labels (in my case, ten labels, but in depends on the age and number of kids) with single words. We had to discuss about them to create a story in which those words were all included and produce our own book by writing the story on big cardboards and decorating them with drawings that represented the situations described. Then, the books were kept on a special shelf on the library to let everyone read them. I loved that activity, as the process of making the stories up was really fun, the stories were really interesting due to the imagination we have when we are kids, and they promoted not just reading, but creativity, working in groups and other social abilities, linguistic and artistic skills, and furthermore the satisfaction of having your own book “published” and read by other people.

On the other hand, and related to some posts written two weeks ago, “The storytelling theatre”. In this game, each monitor was in charge of one group of kids who were going to become storytellers and represent their corresponding story, using puppets, in a little theatre, in which we were hidden behind. For that, the monitor chose who was going to be each character and we read the story all together, each kid their lines, and practising with the puppets. Finally, the stories were represented in the little theatre, so that we became storytellers but also enjoyed the other stories.

I hope you find those activities interesting, and it would be great if you are encouraged to share your own personal experiences in reading or interesting activities you know for the promotion of reading.

Thank you for your visit!

Last session was very interesting for me. We had the opportunity to know some children’s literature authors that I have never seen before. Some of them had really famous works but I did not know the writers.

All of them are very good at their jobs and they have won important literature awards, but now, I would like to talk about the one I researched, specially, about her most important book: The Gruffalo (Julia Donaldson).

The Gruffalo was published in 1999 and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. It was written in verse, as most of the Julia’s works. The story is about a mouse that is going to be eaten by some dangerous animals (a fox, an owl and a snake). The mouse uses his intelligence by inventing an imaginary monster, called Gruffalo, to scare the rest of the animals and…as an element of surprise, the Gruffalo becomes real. I am not going to disclose the end because you need to read it! :).

The Gruffalo also has his own website, that I recommend you to know more about this interesting story: www.gruffalo.com

This website is a good bidirectional resource: our students can use it by their selves and also it is very useful for teachers. In this website it is possible to find lots of interesting resources, but I am going to show some of them:

This section is called “Play and Explore” and  it includes some games in which it is possible to interact with the characters of the book by assembling puzzles, guessing the footprints of the animals, etc. It is very useful cause we can use it before, during and after reading. If we start doing this kind of activities before reading the book, our students can have a general idea about the story. We can also play during, since we can intrigue our students and after, to review what we have read.

Furthermore, this website has some news, not also about The Gruffalo, but about some other books of this charming author. This kind of news can inspire teachers to create similar activities with the students.

Moreover, it contains a rich variety of resources, but not just for students because we have a specific section only for teachers. It also includes an area in which it is possible to sing the songs with Julia Donaldson.

Finally, I would like to say that there are plenty of activities in this website that can be very useful for teachers and students. If we use them correctly in classrooms, our students can develop a lot of competences and intelligences, such as the spatial by assembling puzzles, the musical by singing the songs or the linguistic one, by reading.

I hope you visit this website! I am going to let you the link of the “The Gruffalo’s film” in case you want to watch it:

http://cinefox.tv/ver2666/the-gruffalo_pelicula-completa.html

(This is the only free web I found to watch the film and it has spanish subtitles). I recommend you!!