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.

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!

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.

Today we, Azu Rodríguez and alicia.lopez, would like to share with you an experience that we carried out two days ago, which we consider could be useful for you (especially for those of you who could not come to our lesson). Although for some people it might sound a little bit strange, we included some contents of this wonderful subject, Exploring Children’s Literature in English, into an amazing lesson of the Physical Education subject. Yes! You read it right! Literature and Physical Education were together in one lesson.

Everything came up due to the fact that we had to design a Physical education lesson as a main project for the subject with the same name. Although from the beginning we wanted to give a cross-curricular nuance to our project, initially the contents/topics that we had in mind were reduced to Corporal expression (content of P.E.) and Animals (content of Science). However in the end, we could get a lot more from it, including other science contents and contents of this subject such as: Storytelling, Drama and something similar to Jazz Chants. This is going to be much clearer for you once we have explained you some of the activities.

Firstly, we developed an activity called Photographers. It consisted on the representation of a photograph (of any topic) by the students, who were divided in different groups. The task is based on two different stages: In the first one, while the music is on, a group of students is preparing the photograph, and the rest of classmates are back towards the small group at the same time that they are dancing around them. Then, when the music stops, the small group should statically maintain their position, in order to imitate a photograph. Finally, the rest of the class has to guess what the topic of the photograph is. For helping students to guess the topic of each photograph, we provided them with some grammar structures and sentences that were really useful to express their hypothesis and opinions correctly.

We consider that it was completely linked with the fact of using Drama in Content CLIL lessons, which is something that although we haven’t seen it yet, we will do it in a few lessons.

Photographers: grammar structures

Secondly, we continued with Storytellers. This task is composed by two phases. During the first one, the teacher acts as a narrator who tells the pupils a short story, and at the same time, they have to mimic what he or she is telling them. Along the second phase, students are divided in small groups. In each group, one of the students is the narrator and the other ones represent the story through gestures. Finally, each group shows to the rest of the class their own stories. In order to help them to create the story, we gave them a written frame or template with the general structure of the story.

Storytellers: template

Thirdly, another activity was the one named The Continental Drift. In the beginning we were just looking for a video of a dance, when we stumbled across a video that exceeded our expectations. It did not include just a dance (which was somehow related with the previous topic of the animals, apart from another content of the Science content: the movements of tectonic plates) but also contained a great song which lyrics allowed us to work both, vocabulary movements (move, jump, step, crisscross…) as well as grammar structures (how to give orders). Here you can see the lyrics of the song, and a little bit below we have attached the link of the video in case you want to take a look

The Continental Drift: song lyrics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMuJxd2Gpxo&list=PL0825A7D71881A668

On one hand, important and present components of our Lesson Plan were the Multiple Intelligences. Although, this is not a theory directly related with the subject Children’s Literature in English, we may suppose that it is something that can determine in some way the task engagement of students, in any subject including this one. Concretely, we focused in the following ones:

Musical (Musical Smart), Bodily-Kinesthetic (Body Smart), Interpersonal (Personal Smart) and Verbal-linguistic (Word Smart). The last one could be quite related with this subject.

To put in practice these intelligences (individually and combined) let students feel comfortable with the activities, that is, pupils can feel identified with some of these intelligences. The final result can be resumed as a much more effective and significant learning.

On the other hand, the cross-curricular concept that we have described along this post was not something completely new for us. Specially taking into account those links between in which one of the involved subjects was Children’s Literature in English. In fact, last year, through the subject Natural Science Didactics, we worked on similar activities, where we learnt contents singing and reading fairytales. For instance, we adapted Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Through that story, we tried to teach concepts related to measurements such as temperature (remember that Goldilocks tasted three different soup bowls) and length (Goldilocks took place in three different chairs). It was a creative and interesting activity and these resources can be really motivating for children.

Finally, although our lesson was designed for a concrete year of Primary, the material’s difficulty as well as the activities are easily adaptable. This is the reason why we mentioned at the beginning that it could be useful for you, because it can be applied in almost any year of primary.

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

Fortunatelly, things have changed since I started learning English two decades ago, and after doing some research about Synthetic Phonics, I came across a website that caught my attention. It is called ‘Teach Your Monster to Read‘, and it is intended for native speakers of English aged 4 and above. In this case, and even though there could be some pupils who were not able to understand all that is being said during the game, it is quite intuitive, so  I consider that it could be used with Spanish speakers from the First and Second Cycle of Primary.

The first thing that pupils will find about this game is that they have to design their own avatar, whose physical features are highly personalisable, with the possibility of adding new complements along the game.  This could help children feel motivated and forget that they ‘have to learn’, and just learn while having a good time. Moreover, each stage adds a new type of game, so the children can choose among a variety of mini-games that makes it more interesting as the level goals are achieved.

Whenever a new sound is introduced, the game provides a word beginning with that sound, but instead of doing it in the written form, which could be difficult for early readers, it is done using an easily-recognisable picture like the one below (‘r’- like in ‘rain’).

In my opinion, it is a simple but effective way of learning English phonics. Based on Synthetic Phonics, phonemes are presented following the frequency rate that is typical of these methods, but there is no feeling of repetitiveness, and when more than one phoneme is presented at a time, they form a real word, there are not just random groupings of letters.

Another positive aspect about this proposal is that, whereas there is a version that can be downloaded at a price for tablets, it is free of charge for PC and laptops. Not having to spend extra money so the pupils can use it using the computer lab or at home, is great.