Nowadays, as everyone can see in media or even as we have already seen in our practicum times, education process needs a change. I ask myself, why do we have the necessity of following text book line by line? Along the degree we have realised of the disadvantages of this methodology. Besides we have learnt a lot of resources in order to be carried out in a class apart from the books which could give better results not only to teachers but also to the real protagonists of the teaching and learning process, students.

Regarding the subject, Children’s literature in English, the fact that kept my attention most was the huge amount of literature resources to be used even in a different class to Spanish language.  Storytelling, stories, theatre, poetry are those general topics we have worked on during this semester. I am really amazed about all the activities, resources or ideas we have learnt related to the previous words. Moreover I am not surprised only about the activities but also about the possibility of connecting them with all the other subjects.

As I have already commented on storytelling, stories, and poetry I would like to highlight the fact of bringing theatre into our classes. You are conscious of all the activities that we were practising last week, and also I would say that all of us were spending a good time during this lesson. For that reason, I am not going to summarise them. I just want to talk about one thought that came to my mind while we were representing Disney character figures. My 3^rd year students are learning the animal kingdoms and I know that memorising them is very boring for them, even more for those who do not like natural sciences. So on Monday I was thinking about using this resource in order to review the contents. For example, asking them to represent an animal from the reptiles’ kingdom and so on. I promise I will do it.

So once we have already finish most of our activities I am looking forward to see the results of the plot summary we are preparing and I am very grateful with all we have learnt during this months. Finally, I hope my post had been useful and interesting for all of you. Thank you for reading them and I have to say that in my opinion you have done a good job!

I suppose that when you were a child, you used to listen the music that your parents or old brothers or sisters listened to, don´t you? And then you singed aloud at home without understand almost any word that you were saying. In my case, my father is a big fan of Joan Manuel Serrat, so I grow up singing lyrics like Mediterraneo or Caminante no hay camino, as you can see, there are difficult lyrics that a little child cannot understand. However when I was a teenager and I was studying literature at high school, I realized that those lyrics I had interiorize some years ago there were poems. Then I found some others music bands that use well known poems to make it songs like Marea with Ciudad de los gitanos by Federico García Lorca or Tierra Santa with Canción del Pirata by José de Espronceda. Even there are some CDs composed by poems of an author and singed by different artists, I have found one of Antonio Machado and another one of Pablo Neruda.

So… I was wondering if this will happen with the English poets too. Because of that I started to look for information (difficult task because I don´t know lots of the names that appear in my research and I didn´t know if there are famous English poets or not). And… as we can expect, the most of the song I have found are about Shakespeare poem, but there are others too like: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda or Federico García Lorca have songs in English too! Now we are going to go one by one. I´m going to show you some works of each author.

William Shakespeare: About him there is an album which is a compilation of some of his sonnets performed by famous actors and musicians. It is called When love speaks. Here I give you one of them.

Live with me and be my love by Annie Lenox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBxOsITRPeU

Edgar Allan Poe has a poem, Annabel Lee which it have been versioned by different musicians, here you have the one who did Tiger Army, but there are some other versions by Radio Futura and by an Israeli singer, Shlomo Artzi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZScUxZbe-AQ

Emily Dickinson has a lyric album with her poems too, singed by Aaron Copland and Enrico Maria Polimanti.

Federico García Lorca has a poem Pequeño Valls Vienés that belongs to the book Poeta en Nueva York which Leonard Cohen versioned with a song called Take this Waltz. Have a look, personally I love it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8nWVWE4sjk

Pablo Neruda has a whole album too with some of his sonnets recorded by musicians. The album is called Neruda.

I´d like to go deeper and explain you a little bit more about each writer and author but that is going to take me a lot of time, so if you are interested on it please don´t dude and look for information about it, ask me for help if you need it.

To conclude I have to say that I´ve learnt a lot preparing this post and I hope you will learn and enjoy as I have done.