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.

During the last Medium group session, we worked on the last literary genre: drama. The lesson was especially focused on learning different ways of promoting drama skills, as well as other competences and abilities, in educative contexts through active group games.

Instead of carrying out the lesson inside the classroom, our teacher Raquel decided to make us experience the games, so that we could put ourselves in the students’ shoes and realise how useful and fun they were. So, we went to the gym and we became kids for two hours, playing a lot!. Here I want to share with you three of the games, concretely those I liked the most:

On the one hand, the “Frozen film frames”. For developing this activity, we had to walk around the gym at the rhythm of the music. When the music was stopped, we had to remain still, representing one literary character by doing one of their typical actions (i.e: Hercules showing his biceps). Then, the teacher asked some of us who we were and what we were doing.

After playing individually for some times, we played the same game in groups. In this case, when the music was stopped, the teacher said the name of a children’s book and we had to arrange in small groups, assign a character to each person and represent one of the most important situations of the story.

Through this game, children develop drama skills (body language, improvisation, role-playing…), as well as creativity, imagination and descriptions. Furthermore, it can also be used to teach and revise subject contents, as, for example, the topic to represent could be “invertabrate animals” or “landforms”.

Seven dwarfs going to work. – Source: Raquel Fernández

On the other hand, the “Photo Album”. For this game, two people sat down in one bench and pretended that they were looking at a photo album and talked about the pictures. Meanwhile, some other students were standing up, next to them, and displayed the situations described, freezing as photographs.

Finally, the “Machine”, a very fun game to foster group union and cooperative work. It consists on creating a machine. For that, all the students make a circle and one of them stays in the centre. This kid starts to do a repetitive sound (i. e: beep – beep – beep), and then, one by one, the other students joins the machine by touching one of the members and making another different sound (i.e: brrrrrrrrbrbrbrbrbrrrrrr); until everybody is a part of the machine and all sounds sound together at the same time.

As you may imagine and I believe, all these games attract the attention of the students since the very beginning and they find them really interesting, so every teacher can use them to teach any subject content or to foster different competences and skills.

Do you know any other game for drama lessons? I am wishing to hear about them!!

Thank you for visiting!

This week, my middle group had a great Poetry Workshop, and one of the activities that Raquel proposed us, had to do with the creation of Shape Poetry. In this case, we had to find inspiration using a model that she provided, and there where up to six different types of shape poetry for us to explore.

But, what is shape poetry? in Spanish we know it as caligrama, and according to Wikipedia, it is

A poem, phrase, or word […] arranged in a way that creates a visual image. The image created by the words expresses visually what the word, or words, say. In a poem, it manifests visually the theme presented by the text of the poem.

In my opinion, it is a great resource to present poetry to our pupils in a different way to the ‘create two verses that rhyme’. It is very visual, catchy and interesting. In this case, the poem can be enjoyed not only by listening to, or reading the words, but also by understanding the message that the picture is provoking.

It could be said that the words layout provide a visual clue to understand the poem. Moreover, it can engage those students whose visual-spatial intelligence is more developed than their linguistic intelligence, as they can create poems using few words.

Here you can find some examples taken from the blog “El baúl de las palabras”, created by a literature teacher from IES Federico García Lorca, in La Puebla de Cazalla (Sevilla). They are the proof that, with the proper guidance, pupils or young students can create beautiful poetry.

Furthermore, there are some artists who are able to create amazing designs, such as those by Joni James, in which she uses the names of the parts of the object she is ‘drawing’ to recreate it, as you can see on the bicycle, or words related to the topic, as in the guitar and the heart.

The next question is, can it be used in the classroom with Primary Education pupils? I would say yes. Although the examples above are more elaborated, there are simpler ideas (like the ones we created in class), that can help us teachers, to introduce poetry in the classroom in a really enjoyable and catchy way.

I hope you like the post. I encourage you to explore the topic, and also to have a look at Joni James’ gallery, where you will find authentic works/words or art.

Have a nice week!

Sources:

Blog “El Baúl de las palabras”. IES Federico García Lorca (La Puebla de Cazalla, Sevilla) http://lorcaelbauldelaspalabras.blogspot.com.es/2014/02/caligramas-en-ingles.html

Joni James Calligrams https://www.etsy.com/es/people/jonijames

Wikipedia (Definition of Calligram) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligram

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.

Well, if most of your answers are “yes”, you need to continue reading this post.

As most of you, I started going to theaters when I was in the school. The school always promoted some outings to the theater with the rest of the classes of our course. In my case, I loved going there because it was out of the routine and we could have fun there. But…did you remember something that you have learnt in one of them? How can we use theaters to learn contents?

Theater is one of the most meaningful artistic manifestations that combines literature works with performances. Even though not all of them mix these two elements, for instance mimic theater, both are very important in most of them.

In Egypt and Mesopotamia, there were also some performances of gods in which people used mimic and gestures to express abstract emotions, such as happiness, sadness or hope. This religious current changed throughout history and some new branches appeared, such as comedies, tragedies or satires.  Then, the theater was spread all over the world and nowadays there are some types of them in which adults and children can enjoy at the same time.

Now… close your eyes and imagine one theater. Probably you are imaging a place with a stage and some stands for the audience.

In the last seminar, we saw something related with theaters (you will enjoy it) and that class inspired me something. I would like to change your mind and show you a new branch of this amazing art: MICRO THEATER.

Micro theaters were originated in Spain and they consist on performing short plays in small places with a reduced audience that lasts a short period of time. It is very interesting because the atmosphere that is produced contributes to increment the understanding of the play and the motivation and passion for this art.

Now, you should watch  this video that explains to you better and visually what Micro Theaters are and how they are developed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXcsaycGLLY

What do you think? Do you like them? Are they new for you? Could they be useful for students? Can they develop their creativity? Can they use multiple intelligences? Will they promote HOTS? Will they develop their language skills? How can we implement them in classrooms?

These are the questions that came to my mind when I thought about this possibility.

Mostly, the answers are “of course, why not?”. The idea could be very efficient in classrooms. What we can do is to teach/learn contents through this type of theater. We can choose a topic, for example: the water cycle. The water cycle consists on different steps so we can divide the students into different groups. Each group will have to create a document with a dialogue of each step. Then, they will rehearse and finally, they will create a good performance by linking each step. Of course, they will need some scaffolding but this is something implicit in the creation of the activities.

To end with, I would like to say that, for me, this type of theaters give us the opportunity to work on many different skills and competences, at the same time the students are learning contents. If we want to be innovative in order to improve the students’ level of learning, we can take everything around us, and of course, adapt it to make it efficient.

We are Carolina and Miguel Ángel and as you know, last week was the Medieval Market in Alcalá de Henares. We love these days since Alcalá, for people who don’t know the city, dressed up to commemorate the baptism of Cervantes. We recommend you to visit it next year because there is a very friendly atmosphere and it is possible to learn many things about long time ago. In this market, you can find different handmade stands, animals such as predatory birds, donkeys or horses, troubadours or many different spectacles set in those times.

Making the most of the occasion, we would like to show you an interesting material we found there.  There was a stand in which we realized there were a huge variety of puppets, all of them inspired in fantastic and real animals. But, what is our point of view of this material? Obviously, they can be used as a didactic source.

As all of you know, some weeks ago, we have talked about storytelling and how to do it successfully. These puppets can help us to carry it out and it is a fun resource for children.

These handcrafted animals do not cost a lot of money, however, we can make them in our own so they are even cheaper and have a personalized design. As we know, on the internet there are a lot of interesting webpages to make materials guided with really good scaffolding. So, why aren’t we creative and drive an initiative for our classrooms as teachers?

If you are interest on this, we were talking with the clerk and he explained to us how to do it by ourselves. Firstly and of course, we need the materials: they are made with foam rubber, a glove and paint cans or sprays. Then, the most important element they require is: CREATIVITY.

Finally, as we are imagination engineers, we can use this beautiful material as inspiration to create innovative ones, and after that, to use them not just in storytelling, but performances to develop different multiple intelligences, language skills, teamwork and cooperation, or every activity you imagine.

We hope you like it! Thank you