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.

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.

Last year I made one for my little cousin it was handmade, I think it was a very good present for him because he could always read his story and he will enjoy it because I make it using different textures and now that he is a little bit older he can touch it and see it as many times he want. In my opinion this kind of books are a very good resource because the child feel involve in the story and he pays more attention to it because he is the one who is living the adventures or that he is involved in the weft we could let him some blank pages to continue it by himself and make their imagination and creativity work.

In relation to this types of books other kind are the ones with pops ups like this one:
They were fantastic because as the same time that you were reading you could see what was happening in a 3D dimension and there were other books in which there were secrets and you have to find them and you could play with the pop ups it was so funny.

There are plenty of books of this kind but the best ones are the ones we made telling our own stories I tend to think that because you can invent your own story including your own drawings and that gives the book a lot of personality. There isn´t a perfect formula to write a book we just have to let our imagination fly, start writing words and scrawls to make the first ideas come out and then put them into an order then things everything will fall into its place.

Personally, I feel strongly that we should encourage our students to write books, poems and little stories to make their imagination blow, and be more creative besides there are going to became richer, because they will learn more vocabulary and they will express themselves better.

Finally I would like to talk about interactive books, this type of books are popular know because it’s been more common to have tablets and electronic devices at home for the use of the smallest of the house and are a very good resource to read them stories but we have to read stories as well to variety of books that children read.

I will like to know your opinion about this, and if you have ever had the chance to have a personalized book. Thanks for ridding and I hope you like it.

As those weeks we had been working in our workshops related with Aladdin I was thinking about a possibility of doing something similar in a real school, I consider the workshops we are doing are a great motivational tool for children and can be really useful to make them read in most of the cases, so why don’t use this tool at schools as a way to motivate our pupils to take a book.

Maybe there would be a possibility of doing one workshop per two weeks, those would be about different books, of course all of them appropriate for children. During those two weeks the students would have the possibility to read the books and then to assist to the workshop which will be closely related with what they read and the teachers would have time to thing and concrete the way of the development of the whole project.

Apart of being a way to promote reading there are more positive aspects, as for example the idea of including HOTS in the workshops, the activities that we can introduce can be closely related with analyzing and creating, also we will have the possibility of introducing multiple intelligences with different types of activities and probably one of the most interesting aspects, we can relate the workshops with the different subjects, in a way the different teachers will include activities which are going to be related with their subjects and in which they are the experts. So the art teacher will make posters, painting activities, etc. The P.E teacher will work with the kinesthetic intelligence, the English teacher would do the activities in English and so on.

I’m conscious about the fact that this is only an idea and there are going to appear lots of problems to solve during the implementation of this project, but I think it would be an incredible experience to see the whole school with all teachers involved in a project that relates literature with lots of subjects.

I would like to know your opinion about this idea, and don’t worry, it hasn’t to be positive, I know there are many things to improve, share your thoughts with me!

The first thing I thought when I saw the headline was “I can’t believe that a gymnast like her tells her experiences about sport in two books. And even, if those books are for children”. So, I start to read the article and I see that she created a main character named “Olympia”, as a reference to the Olympic Games, so children, only reading the name of the character can discover what is her goal: reach the Olympic Games.

Using Olympia, Almudena told her story and how she became the best Spanish gymnast (she reached the finals of four Olympic Games: Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008) and gives tips about how to decorate the maillots, the make-up and the hair styles.

How we can use that books in our future classes?

That article made me think about how we can show our future students about healthy habits and promote sports in class. This kind of books are awesome for reach this objective because we have a story, specially adapted for children, with pictures, so they we can be focused only in the pictures if our students don’t have the reading skills learnt.

Also, that stories talks about other things rather than the main story. It’s like a “cross-curricular” book, because we have literature in the story and arts and crafts in the tips Almudena gives about her maillots.

One disadvantage and a great solution for that

One disadvantage of those books is that can be only focused on girls, because it can be a little bit strange (I don’t say impossible) to see a boy decorating a maillot or thinking about making-up, but we can adapt it to them!

For example, changing the name of the main character and giving our students the chance to create their own story about a gymnast. For example, while I was writing that I thought about a character named “Athos” (Yes, like the Musketeer, but can be a reference to Athens) who wants to be at the final of the swimming competition of the Olympic Games of Tokyo 2020, so he starts practising for it and reach, in 2015, the Spanish national championship, so his dream begins there. Can you imagine of creating a story like this at class?

A conclusion and a thought

Just to conclude, also, we can think about having in our class a meeting with the author of the book, Almudena Cid, and our students can talk to her and ask her about how she reached those four finals and how she prepared for that. Or, we can invite Gervasio Deferr, and ask him the same questions. These are just dreams that can be unreal in a real class, but if we didn’t dream about improving our classes, who will do it for us?.

Link to the news, if you want to read the whole article (in Spanish): http://www.20minutos.es/noticia/2289589/0/almudena-cid-narra-vivencia/trayectoria-deportiva-dos/cuentos-infantiles/

This week’s project was related to creating our very own Classroom Library. It was a tough task to do, if we wanted to make it operative, attractive and affordable. There were plenty of things to be taken into account, but I was positive about not leaving aside what could help the students to get the most of the opportunity that having a Classroom Library can bring to their reading experience.

It would be naïve to think that students are going to read, just because we, the teachers, want them to do it. There must be something that ignites the intrinsic motivation that will create real long-lasting readers, and sometimes we have to make use of different strategies to get it.

You could think now that if you want them to read, you need books, and I agree, although paper books are not the only type of books that we can present to our pupils. In this case, my proposal is about an online resource that can be really useful for both pupils and teachers, and it could also involve parents in their children’s learning experience.

It is called Raz-Kids, and I had the chance to see how it works last year. This award-winning programme allows pupils to access to hundreds of levelled books (fiction and non-fiction), and they have the opportunity to read, listen to, or even recording the stories themselves. Apart from this, they can take some quizzes that will make them earn points to be used to create their own robots and reading rockets. This works wonders as extra motivation for the pupils, who want to read and take the quizzes to improve their level.

It sounds good for students, but…what does it have for the teachers? In fact, plenty of things. It allows not only to monitor the amount of reading done by each pupil, but also the quality of the reading. For example, and thanks to the quizzes that the students take so willingly in order to earn points, the programme generates a lot of useful information for the teachers, as shown in the next pictures.

The license is intended for a class of up to 36 students and 1 teacher. Each pupil has their own password, and the teacher can control some features for the pupils, such as the beginning level, if they can play or not with the robot, or if it is allowed for them to access books in Spanish.

If I had the chance to use it in my future jobs as a teacher, I would do it, no doubt. What about you? Do you consider it interesting? I am looking forward to have your feedback!

Thanks for reading, comments will be welcome

During my first year of Practicum in CEIP Cristobal Colón the students had a small library in each classroom, it was a surprise for me taking into account that in the school there is a library already but when I asked my tutor about it she told me that the “big” library was mainly used by teachers so they decided to make a small place with books for children in each classroom. That space was mainly used when someone finished an activity really quickly or there are only few minutes until the class will finish, then they could take a book they want and read it. In my class the students also had a reading hour on Fridays but on those hours instead using the library they had in class, all the pupils were reading the same book and after that they were doing different activities about the pages they read.

During my second year of Practicum in Gredos San Diego the way of using the books was a real surprise for me, they didn’t had a classroom library but instead of that, each one of the students had to bring everyday a book he/she likes to the school, the curious thing was that they used to read every day after the break for ten minutes, in order to calm down and get the perfect mood to start with the class, this technique got so popular in the class that my teacher used it also when she considered that the students are not focused enough, or if the class before was Physical Education and the pupils were nervous. In Gredos San Diego there was also a reading class and it was on Fridays. But it was a little bit different, because as in Cristobal Colón that reading class was just reading and doing activities, in Gredos it was more than that, after reading we were discussing, and asking open questions to the children, also making competitions in groups with questions in order to make it more active and cooperative.

In my personal opinion I have to say that in the first school (CEIP Cristobal Colón) the activities were not developed to motivate the student but only to check if they comprehend the stories, but a good point is that they had a small library with appropriate books in each class. In fact in the second school (Gredos San Diego) they hadn’t the library but the activities of the reading classes were done to motivate the students to keep reading.

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!