First of all we created new characters, creatures that are related to us and have some of our characteristics, or maybe not, maybe it’s our antagonist but all of them have something special that have been created starting from our imagination and they have a little bit of magic on them. After creating this magic, malicious, benevolent, hero we have mixed it with all the characters created by our mates; then we made groups of 5 – 6 people and then we picked again other characters different to the ones that we have created, so we have new ones.

Later on we will have to create and develop a story with those characters to create a poster for our new movie and then sell it to someone who will be interested on bringing our story to the big screen. We will see the results this week…

As a result of this activity, I was thinking on different ways to translate this to our future classrooms

and which has first come to my mind is “the traveller book” I’m sure most of you know what is this but for the ones who don’t know it… Is a book in which the students create their own story we can begin it in white or we can give them the beginning of the story, after that one of our pupils is going to take the book to its house to continue the story with the help of his parents. The main aim is that the students create a new page for the common story but taking into account what was written first to give the story the sense it has to have.

This could be another way to make our students create their own story and being creative and motivate moreover the attendant of the book could read the new part of the story on Mondays and the rest of the class could draw a picture based on its mates part of the story and then select one of the pictures from all and paste it in the book to make it funnier.

Could you imagine other activities like this to create collaborative and cooperative stories or books? I would be pleased of reading your comments and thanks for your attention.

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!

Of course they use new technologies when they record themselves and when they create websites. Introducing storytelling and technologies in the classroom is quite easy, but… Why not trying to make students feel like real storytellers?

Students can be part of their own projects, and combine the creation of storytelling with digital resources. This can be a great opportunity for them to express themselves, besides fomenting the creativity, supporting high order thinking skills and working on different multiple intelligences such as interpersonal.

They can record themselves, or use other digital support to record their voices and add pictures, as the example that gives the following link, in which a student made a storytelling talking about her own life:

http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/view_story.cfm?vid=392&categoryid=8&d_title=Personal Reflection

This is taken from the website “The educational uses of digital storytelling”, created by students of the University of Houston, showing how students and teachers use this technology and create their own works.

Some of this programmes that are useful to work with students in this way are: Photo Story, Movie Maker for Windows, or iMovie for Apple MacBook.

You can see how one of these programmes works, in the following video that is a tutorial of Photo Story:

As you can see, technologies can be adapted to work with them in class, and they can give us advantages and fascinating ideas. Not only to use other types of materials, but to activate and provoke the development of the learners.

The first thing I thought when I saw the headline was “I can’t believe that a gymnast like her tells her experiences about sport in two books. And even, if those books are for children”. So, I start to read the article and I see that she created a main character named “Olympia”, as a reference to the Olympic Games, so children, only reading the name of the character can discover what is her goal: reach the Olympic Games.

Using Olympia, Almudena told her story and how she became the best Spanish gymnast (she reached the finals of four Olympic Games: Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008) and gives tips about how to decorate the maillots, the make-up and the hair styles.

How we can use that books in our future classes?

That article made me think about how we can show our future students about healthy habits and promote sports in class. This kind of books are awesome for reach this objective because we have a story, specially adapted for children, with pictures, so they we can be focused only in the pictures if our students don’t have the reading skills learnt.

Also, that stories talks about other things rather than the main story. It’s like a “cross-curricular” book, because we have literature in the story and arts and crafts in the tips Almudena gives about her maillots.

One disadvantage and a great solution for that

One disadvantage of those books is that can be only focused on girls, because it can be a little bit strange (I don’t say impossible) to see a boy decorating a maillot or thinking about making-up, but we can adapt it to them!

For example, changing the name of the main character and giving our students the chance to create their own story about a gymnast. For example, while I was writing that I thought about a character named “Athos” (Yes, like the Musketeer, but can be a reference to Athens) who wants to be at the final of the swimming competition of the Olympic Games of Tokyo 2020, so he starts practising for it and reach, in 2015, the Spanish national championship, so his dream begins there. Can you imagine of creating a story like this at class?

A conclusion and a thought

Just to conclude, also, we can think about having in our class a meeting with the author of the book, Almudena Cid, and our students can talk to her and ask her about how she reached those four finals and how she prepared for that. Or, we can invite Gervasio Deferr, and ask him the same questions. These are just dreams that can be unreal in a real class, but if we didn’t dream about improving our classes, who will do it for us?.

Link to the news, if you want to read the whole article (in Spanish): http://www.20minutos.es/noticia/2289589/0/almudena-cid-narra-vivencia/trayectoria-deportiva-dos/cuentos-infantiles/

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.

To contribute to this aim, I want to present you through this post, another way to enjoy with literature. I am referring to micro stories, also known as micro tales, micro fiction, flash fiction… In order to have a more clear idea about micro stories, it is useful to read some definitions about this term. For instance, Mac Millan Dictionary website defines them as “a style of literature in which stories are extremely short and often consist of less than 300 words”. Meanwhile, MicroStory website explains that “a MicroStory has no limits but length. A MicroStory must be 499 words or less. That is all”.

First image

Nevertheless, this is not something new for us. During the first year, in the subject Desarrollo de las Habilidades Comunicativas, the teacher taught us micro tales, concretely, he talked about a school where students wrote their own micro tales. He told us a Spanish micro tale that a girl of primary education created:

I do not exactly the reason why that moment was amazing for me. Maybe it is true that the best perfumes come in small bottles. Since that moment I understood, that micro tales could be a great and innovative tool to develop literature activities with our students.

In this sense, it is really interesting the lesson plan that Brown and Schulten (2013) propose to read and to write micro stories with students. An example could be the warm-up activity, where the teacher has to write in the blackboard the following micro tale, attributed to Ernest Hemingway:

Then, the teacher asks them to consider whether or not they think it is a story. Once students have had time to reflect on it, they can discuss with their peers about it.
Another great possibility to work micro tales is Twitter, where students can create their own flash fiction. Due to the fact that on Twitter, we have a limited number of characters to write each tweet, it is quite easy to develop good micro stories. A great model is @themicrostories.
Finally, I would like to stand out The tiny book of tiny stories, a book created throughout the collaboration of many flash fiction authors. Right after, there are some micro stories belonging to the book.

Second image

Third image

If you are interested in micro tales I recommend you to research the following websites and articles.

http://www.microstory.com/definition.php

https://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/epstein_5_15_11/

https://goldbot.wordpress.com/category/prose-2/micro-tales/

http://www.sixwordstories.net/

https://twitter.com/microcuentos

http://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/13/the-tiny-book-of-tiny-stories/

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

Brown, A. and Schulten, K. (2013). Short and Sweet: reading and writing flash fiction. Retrieved from http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/short-and-sweet-reading-and-writing-flash-fiction/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

First image from http://www.tericrosschetwood.com/why-i-hate-flash-fiction/

Second and third images from http://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/13/the-tiny-book-of-tiny-stories/

In any case, it could be possible to deal with some improvements. On the one hand, I would have like to know and to present authors in a closer way. For instance, It would be fantastic to talk about them in a reading circle. On the  other hand, time was too short, so we could just talk about general ideas.

Due to these facts, I consider interesting to add some ideas about the author (Roald Dahl) that I was investigating with my partners Carmen Rojo and Loli Casco.

It was great to know about the considerable contribution that he made to children’s literature. Even nowadays, his legacy persists in an active and collaborative way. This is possible thanks to Roald Dahl Museum that works really hard to make possible that children can be closed and engaged to Roald Dahl’s life and books through many different, creative and active activities that are celebrated in the Museum. According to the Official Website, the museum presents three main galleries:

• Boy gallery. It is about Roald Dahl’s childhood, his love of chocolate and his schoolboy pranks (children’s jokes).
• Solo gallery. It is related to his journey to Africa. Visitors can appreciate  how Roald Dahl’s real-life adventures led him to become a writer. They can experience the atmosphere of Roald Dahl’s original Writing Hut (small and isolated house, a kind of shelter).
• The story centre. This is the Museum’s creative hub where the displays will inspire visitors own writing and story-making. They can listen to top tips from their favorite authors, make a stop-frame animation, sit in a replica of Roald Dahl’s writing chair.

Considering that it is difficult to visit the museum, it is interesting to have a look to the museum galleries through the Virtual Museum Tour.

I would like to end up this post with an inspiring quote of this exceptional author:

“You must be a perfectionist. That means you must never be satisfied with what you have written until you have rewritten it again and again, making it as good as you possibly can”.

First image: Roald Dahl’s writing hut

Second image: Replica of Roald Dahl´s writing hut

Third image: Replica of Roald Dahl’s writing chair

First image from http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/14902536

Second and third images from http://www.roalddahl.com/

Source: tumblr.com

 As I am sure that, as current and future teachers, we should encourage our students and kids to read and show them how many benefits reading has, I would like to share with you the two activities we carried out at the library that I liked the most and I believe that they were useful on promoting us to read:

On the one hand, the “Making a story up”, an activity that consisted on playing in groups with different labels (in my case, ten labels, but in depends on the age and number of kids) with single words. We had to discuss about them to create a story in which those words were all included and produce our own book by writing the story on big cardboards and decorating them with drawings that represented the situations described. Then, the books were kept on a special shelf on the library to let everyone read them. I loved that activity, as the process of making the stories up was really fun, the stories were really interesting due to the imagination we have when we are kids, and they promoted not just reading, but creativity, working in groups and other social abilities, linguistic and artistic skills, and furthermore the satisfaction of having your own book “published” and read by other people.

On the other hand, and related to some posts written two weeks ago, “The storytelling theatre”. In this game, each monitor was in charge of one group of kids who were going to become storytellers and represent their corresponding story, using puppets, in a little theatre, in which we were hidden behind. For that, the monitor chose who was going to be each character and we read the story all together, each kid their lines, and practising with the puppets. Finally, the stories were represented in the little theatre, so that we became storytellers but also enjoyed the other stories.

I hope you find those activities interesting, and it would be great if you are encouraged to share your own personal experiences in reading or interesting activities you know for the promotion of reading.

Thank you for your visit!

This week in class we have had the seminar in which we have been talking about our experiences with storytelling and books, that we have read when we were little, so this has inspired me to tell you a little bit of my story and how books came to my life…; well I was not so young when I started to love reading books, I have been always a little bit lazy, so I could say that when I was little I didn’t felt so much comfortable with opening a book and started to read or just see the pictures as other child used to do.

I started to love reading when I was in fourth year of High School, the reason why I started reading more since that year was that I didn’t have any other form to scape, and the books that I read normally where the one that where mandatory to read in class; so I found a book in which the protagonist has the same problems as me. He hates mathematics, so one night he started dreaming with a devil who explains that mathematics isn’t so horrible, so I felt so close to that boy, that I continue reading. I think that I read that book at least seven times. When I felt a little bit worried about something I run to read some of this book called “The number devil”.

Another type of books that I read when I was little where comics, such as “Asterix and Obelix” ones, I always thought that this kind of books where easy to read because they have pictures instead of being plenty of words and that is what likes most of them. Another book that surprises me a lot was “Charlie and the chocolate factory”, I read it at school also and I love it, it was so creative.

After all this kind of books I started to read fantasy books, the ones in which you have to imagine all the world and all the things that the writer has describe, in this way I could imagine the story how I liked, and it was amazing, so I still reading that type because is the one I like the most.

Finally I would like to conclude saying that reading is not a thing that you must do, because is compulsory, is a thing that you should do because you like it, because you enjoy and you have fun doing it. “You know that you love reading when you find a book with the one you can’t stop reading until you finish it, you devour it”.

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