First of all I have to say that the location of the lesson was in the gym instead of in a regular classroom and what we were going to do there was more related with a theatre or body expression class than with a literature lesson. At the beginning we all were a little bit shy and afraid of doing what Raquel asked but little by little we were more relaxed.

Although the lesson was different and I felt a bit confusing it was really funny, enjoyable and original. We all participated in a very active way being volunteers or being a part of a performance, and I thought…why not using this with primary students to develop literature? It may seem crazy or difficult to carry it out but not impossible, besides it has a lot of adaptations for everything we want to teach.

So what are the advantages of using theater in school?

-It develops children imagination, creativity and the different ways of expression, not only language using all the senses.

-It gives advantages to the relationships between peers and the teacher.

-Children assimilate better the concepts and knowledge if they have to represent any idea of a subject.

-Doing theater in the class help students to talk in front of an audience, being more self-confident, to get over shyness and to express their ideas and feelings.

-It reinforces the academic task as language, reading and literature through theater plays and roles.

-Using theater in the classroom introduce children into art and history.

Some of these ideas are from a very interesting blog I found called Tiching Blog and I recommend you to take it a look. Here is the link http://blog.tiching.com/el-teatro-una-herramienta-mas-en-el-aula/

In my opinion we should use more theatre in class and body language because it has a lot of advantage we can use in many different ways. It was very nice to do all those activities and think how we could adapt them to a literature class. I enjoyed so much the lesson, the hours flied and I learnt a lot.

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!

According with Rebecca Walters (2014), the “Readers Theatre or Reader’s Theater is a style of theater in which the actors do or do not memorize their lines. Actors use only vocal expression to help the audience understand the story rather than visual storytelling such as sets, costumes, intricate blocking, and movement. This style of performance of literature was initially lauded because it emphasized hearing a written text as a new way to understand literature.”

It means that Readers Theater is a style of theater in which we don’t need to much resources or preparation time to performance some texts. Furthermore it also means that it is a great possibility to work in our classes. In fact, there are some web pages with some interesting resources to work on contents through the Readers Theater.

Here you have my favorites. They are really well organized and I recommend you visit at least one of this pages.

http://www.thebestclass.org/rtscripts.html

http://www.aaronshep.com/rt/RTE.html

http://www.readinga-z.com/fluency/readers-theater-scripts/

http://www.teachingheart.net/readerstheater.htm

In addition, I will like to share with you my own experience when I was playing Reader Theater. We played different levels of this theater style, and I realize that this task could be great to work on a progressive way.  I think that, because at the same time that you are working on contents, you fell really involved in a literature environment and this could be really useful for children. Also I realize that it is a great opportunity to work on pronunciation and intonation. In fact, I have corrected my own mistakes as blood or walruses pronunciation.  Furthermore we were deciding in groups the emphasis, the pauses and the stress points. In this way we can encourage communication in our lessons.

In conclusion this is a new tool for us and it is full of advantages. I am sure that there are some disadvantages too, although I didn’t realize them. Anyway we can try it and check it.