We were divided into six groups around the corridors of the principal building. Each group was decorated in a different scenario of Aladdin’s movie. Like the market, the Cave of Wonders, the dessert, the palace… if you were walking you could see some Aladdin, Jasmines, tigers, Jaffars or Genies running with flying carpets, magic lamps and all kind of things from the Arabian culture.

When the children came to my group scenario, called “The Secrets of Arabia”, they had to stay in front of the classroom door, touch the magic lamp and wait until the Genie comes and he give them 3 wishes. The Genie gave them money to buy things in Arabia, a way of transport, which is the flying carpet, and a turban to start the tour.

The first thing they could see was the market where Aladdin and his monkey Abu were waiting for them to teach them how to buy. Pupils could buy typical jewelry, fruit (apples, dates, and bananas), bread, tea or vessels. After the market, kids went to the palace were Jaffar was waiting for them. He taught them Arabian rules from the film trough activities and poetry. One rule was “Don’t steal or they will cut your hands” and another one was “The princess only has to marry a prince”. Then, they went to the palace garden where the princess Jasmine was dancing. She played some Arabic music and taught students how to do it following the instructions of a video. Children liked it and both, girls and boys, enjoyed this corner and danced together. The Genie was with the pupils during the whole tour helping them if they had any problem to speak English or if they didn’t understand something. Every time that the students finished a corner and they had to change to other one, the characters of those corners joined them to the next one, so at the end we were all together dancing and having fun. Finally, we gave them a bracelet as a little present from Arabia to make them remember this day and how great it was.

Personally, I liked very much the workshop and doing the performance with children instead of do it with our classmates but I also have to say that it was very exhausted but it was worth it.

As those weeks we had been working in our workshops related with Aladdin I was thinking about a possibility of doing something similar in a real school, I consider the workshops we are doing are a great motivational tool for children and can be really useful to make them read in most of the cases, so why don’t use this tool at schools as a way to motivate our pupils to take a book.

Maybe there would be a possibility of doing one workshop per two weeks, those would be about different books, of course all of them appropriate for children. During those two weeks the students would have the possibility to read the books and then to assist to the workshop which will be closely related with what they read and the teachers would have time to thing and concrete the way of the development of the whole project.

Apart of being a way to promote reading there are more positive aspects, as for example the idea of including HOTS in the workshops, the activities that we can introduce can be closely related with analyzing and creating, also we will have the possibility of introducing multiple intelligences with different types of activities and probably one of the most interesting aspects, we can relate the workshops with the different subjects, in a way the different teachers will include activities which are going to be related with their subjects and in which they are the experts. So the art teacher will make posters, painting activities, etc. The P.E teacher will work with the kinesthetic intelligence, the English teacher would do the activities in English and so on.

I’m conscious about the fact that this is only an idea and there are going to appear lots of problems to solve during the implementation of this project, but I think it would be an incredible experience to see the whole school with all teachers involved in a project that relates literature with lots of subjects.

I would like to know your opinion about this idea, and don’t worry, it hasn’t to be positive, I know there are many things to improve, share your thoughts with me!

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!