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

The teaching of both phonemes and graphemes is basic for teaching reading and writing, and it represents one of the biggest challenges to which past, present and future teachers, especially the ones working with Literature in any language, have to deal with. Depending on how the teacher prepares and leads the lesson, including the methodology carried out, the materials and resources used, the way of managing the situations, etc.; the teaching-learning process of phonics may be really motivating, fun and successful, or, on the contrary, it could become a really difficult task for both the teacher and the students, with boring lessons, confusion and even empty learning.

As we have seen in class, there is one method that teachers can follow, called Synthetic Phonics, which is aimed to teach reading and writing basing on how letters or groups of letters correspond with sounds -the link grapheme-phoneme-. As some of my classmates have already explained and demonstrated in their posts, like Susana’s or Miguel Ángel’s, this method has its advantages and disadvantages, and there is a really current debate between those experts that agree with it and consider it really useful and those that totally reject it.

In order to go further with the knowledge on it and be able to have a supported opinion about it, I decided to do some research about the method and about the most popular material to work Synthetic Phonics, which is called Jolly Phonics; and I found something that I considered it was worth it to share with you, hoping that you find it interesting too and useful for your training as future teachers: the five skills –taken as stages-, worked with Jolly Phonics, that are necessary to learn to read and to write.

To begin with, the first stage is the learning of the 42 main letter sounds –including digraphs, like oo, and the different sounds that they can make-, which is carried out through the connection between each sound with an action to represent it. The sounds are learnt following a particular order, from those simpler to those more complex.

Secondly, once children have learnt the sounds, they start the learning of letter formation, which involves children learning how to form and write letters with their pencil, and, as it occurs with the sounds, the learning goes from the most basic and used forms (i.e.: c, which could be used later to make d) to the most complex shapes.

Thirdly, the next stage consists on blending the individual sounds together to make up new words. During this process, it is important to know that we have to be aware of the fact that digraphs, despite of being represented by two letters, they are just one sound.

Then, the fourth stage is called segmenting, and it involves the identification of sounds in words, from the simplest (like cat) to the most complex. In this stage, tapping out the sounds while saying them may help (four taps = 4 sounds).

And the last stage is the learning of tricky words, which are those common words with an irregular spelling that cannot be read by blending. Some methods to learn them are: Look, Cover, Write and Check; Say as it sounds, Mnemonics, etc.

Finally, I would like to share with you the post written by Jaime, which presents a real experience in a classroom working with Jolly Phonics.

Hope you have found this first post interesting!

Rocío Hidalgo.