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.

Today I am going to share with you the last project we are carrying out, the Aladdin’s workshop; and particularly, the workshop my group and I are preparing: Discovering the cultural secrets of Arabia.

During the last two weeks, we have been preparing a workshop that we are developing next Tuesday, 25^th November, with a group of students from a public school in Alcalá de Henares.

The pillars of this project are the powerful and multiple uses of children films in education. I think that all of us are sure that every film, even those that we think are simple and with a basic plot, can be used in many different ways to present the contents to kids through a motivating, enjoyable and cross-curricular methodology, and interesting and close materials and resources.

For this project, the workshops are devoted to teaching Science contents through English and through Aladdin’s film. For that, we are working on six different workshops, each of them dedicated to one Science topic; using the characters, places, elements and other aspects present in Aladdin’s film as the medium to carry out the teaching-learning process.

In my case, my group decided to work on Arabian culture (“The secrets of Arabia”), as the film is constantly presenting, both directly through the dialogues or songs, or indirectly, by just showing them in the scenes, the main aspects of that area and its culture: places in Arabia, artistic elements such as the decoration of the streets or houses, the music, instruments and dances; market products like food or ornaments, animals, monuments, laws and rules, clothing, social classes, gender differences (men vs. women), religious beliefs, etc.

As you can see, there is an enormous amount of elements that we can work on. However, we are only having twenty minutes to develop the whole workshop, so we have chosen the four following topics for teaching them directly:

1. Geography: Location of Arabia in the world map and the Geography of the country.
2. Market: products sold in markets and ways of buying them.
3. Palace: social classes and laws of Arabia.
4. Palace Gardens: Art, music, instruments and dances.

Furthermore, we have to take into account that we are living in the era of technology, so we are introducing ICTs in almost every corner. Then, the whiteboard will be used to show the maps and to present the Palace rooms in which the students will click to see the different laws of Arabia; and a computer is used to watch the Arabian dance and listen to the song while learning the choreography.

Finally, to conclude the workshop, we are letting the kids use their cameras to feel like tourists and take pictures or selfies in every corner, and we are giving them a souvenir from Arabia to thank them for their visit and wish them a good day.

When I was in my last practice time, my tutor and I had a problem: “How we can teach children to use the auxiliary verb ‘do’ in negative sentences without making the explanation boring?” and there was where my mind starts to think about a way to explain it without saying the grammar part. We have to take into account that children of 6-7 years didn’t know how to build correctly a sentence (subject + verb + complements) at this time of the course, because this part was later.

Talking to my tutor, she told me that she thinks about creating a character named Mr. Do who needs the negative particle ‘not’ to appear and help them to create the negative sentence. So, starting from this idea, I decided to give our character a “body”, in order to help children with it, because if children see that Mr. Do exists, they pay more attention to our explanation and they also remember what Mr. Do wants to help us.

But all this thoughts could be nothing if Mr. Do doesn’t work in class and teach children how to create the structure of a negative sentence. To know that, we have to apply it in our class, so my tutor called all the children to the “assembly space” and introduce Mr. Do with questions to the children, for example:

• Teacher: Alejandro, do you like apples?
• Alejandro: Yes, I do
• Teacher: Ok, and, Lucia, do you like bananas?
• Lucia: No, I don’t (because children knows how to answer correctly that questions)
• Teacher: Ok, so, to learn how to say that Lucia doesn’t like bananas, we need “Mr. Do”
• Children: Mr. Do???
• Teacher: Yes, Mr. Do is a special guest for saying that we don’t like something. So, he will help us if we give him our ‘not’ of the sentence. For example: I wrote “I like apples”, but, how I can say that “I not like apples”? I need Mr. Do, who helps me if I give him… what Mr. Do needs?
• Children: The no!!!
• Teacher: That’s right! So, he will come to our sentence (I do not like apples) and we write I don’t like apples.

I think this method can work to teach children how to make a negative sentence if they don’t know “conscientiously” how to create a sentence, and, from this experience, I knew that they like the character because they told me “Jaime, will you bring back Mr. Do again?” and I have to answer that I don’t know because Mr. Do is too busy working for other children.

To end the post, I leave you here a question: Do you think this kind of resources will help children to learn better?