For this week I would like to write a little bit about a new project that we have in this subject that I think we are all going to enjoy a lot. The project is about “Children’s literature workshops”

The first thing that the teacher did to catch our attention about the topic was to tell us that we were going to work with children. This can sound strange, because we are going to be teachers and we will deal with them every day, but as we are still in University, I think that this point is very important.

The reason why I think so, is because we are doing a lot of projects or presentations in which we have to imagine that our audience are children, but to know that, in this case, this is going to be true, I think that catches even more our attention and that we take this project with more energy.

Secondly, Raquel showed us some trailers about the films we could choose to be the topic for our workshops. As I could see in class, we were all (or nearly all); very excited to see again some of the films that we watched when we were little children. The possibilities were: The Lord of the Rings, Mary Poppins, Aladdin, The Jungle Book, Gulliver’s Travels and Snow White. At the end, Aladdin was the one who won.

I have to admit, that when the teacher told as that we all had to think about a different topics with the same film, I thought it would be a bit difficult. With this little sentence I would like to have a brief reflection: we you have to go deeper into the things that surround as, and not only what you can see with the naked eye. In this case it refers to see beyond in a film, but we can take this advice for a lot of situations in our daily life.

Later, we had time to reason about the specific topic we wanted to deal with. In my case, my group and I decided to make the workshop about “Life in the desert”. At the moment, we have a lot of ideas about how to make this very attractive for the children and, at the same time, that they learn a lot about the topic through a film that we all know.

I can not finish this post without saying that these kind of lessons give us a lot of opportunities to see more materials and resources that we can use in our future lessons, but also how to work with them correctly, which is also very important.

Thank you very much for reading my post and I wait for your comments and opinions!

For the third post, I would like to talk about the classroom library work that all of us have to do.  In this case, I considered the blog a useful tool to analyze the difficulties we are having during the process.

The first thing I thought when Raquel explained to us the project was: “Ok, hallelujah! This work seems easier than the rest. “

But…what happened? When I met with my peers and we started, we realized that this project was more difficult than we thought. For people who do not know it, the project consists on creating an imaginary classroom library for children in the first cycle of Primary. We have a reduced budget and we have to show our proposal for our Head Department to convince them about our idea. So, even though the project is intangible, we have to use real data.

And…Get on with it! We brainstormed and then, we agreed with the best idea. Well! Thinking the idea was not very difficult! (“the same feeling, again”). Let’s make the presentation.

When we thought we could start doing it, we could not yet. Firstly, we had to reflect on all the areas we needed to include. We had to organize the classroom, the shelvin,etc. with a little money. How were we going to achieve everything? Then, the books:  the most difficult task. Should the books be written in English? What kind of literature were we going to include in our library? How can we organize the different sections? Creativity and reflection were the most important tools we used.

Finally, after a long period of thinking, we got it. I am not going to uncover our project because it is a surprise for you and we hope you like it.

As a conclusion, on one hand, I would like to say that for me, this project has so much sense. We have to take real data, real furniture, real prizes and real literature and then, adapt it to a classroom. This kind of proposal is the one we are probably going to use in our school. First of all, we have to create a good one in order to convince our supervisors. If we do not have a well-structured project, our project will not be carried out. On the other hand, to create  it, we needed a lot of creativity and reflection.  This is what we should do with our students, not only completing the activities but also, challenging their high order thinking skills.