I have written since I can remember. Sometimes I just let my imagination take me wherever it wanted to go, and wrote until my eyelids dropped. Other times, I had to push myself in order to get something readable that met the established criteria for a given task. But every time, I did my best to make it work.

A few weeks ago, our teacher asked us to create a Fairy Tale Character. Yes! I thought. That was possibly the best chore I had this semester. She provided us with a template (included below) that we had to use to make this character as real as possible. We were required to create the psychological aspects of the characters, more than the usual physical descriptions. And depending on how comfortable students felt about dealing with feelings, some of us were thrilled to bits, while others thought OMG! How are we going to do this?

And here is the point. Creating a character requires, and deserves, a level of commitment that transforms the task into something serious. You need to be able to put yourself on your character’s shoes, and the last item of the template (Your personal connection with the character), allowed me to think that it could have a further use, such as including our characters in a story. In the end, if you have created them, who could understand them better than yourself?

But that wasn’t the case. This week, the teacher told us that we would be required to write, in groups of four or five people, the plot of a story, using characters created by others. It made everything much more difficult and challenging. What if the creators of Alexiah, Mr. Fitman, Guffita or Wickedmore (the characters my group had to include in our story) don’t like what we have done with them? That was my biggest fear when we started working on the project.

Now the project is almost done, and we have to present it to the rest of the class. I wonder what would be left of the character I create. I know how she thinks, I know what she wants. Will she behave the way I expect? I will have the chance to check it next Tuesday. I can’t wait.

For the activity that we designed we were all dressed-up as characters from Aladdin’s film. And the plot of our activity begins by the time the Genie comes back from his trip around the world. Then in the activity the Genie appears with loads of presents that he took for Aladdin and Jasmine. During the activity children have to classify all the presents that the Genie bring for them depending on the country that the presents came from and by the time they finish it they have to define the route that the Genie follow during his holidays around the world.

It was a really fun and interesting project in which all of us learnt and had a great time, although it would be hard to say who enjoyed it more; the children or us.

Secondly I´m going to talk about the THEATRE activity that we did this week, which personally I think that it has loads of possibilities.

As I’ve just said, during this week we used the theatre as a tool for bringing English to students in a motivational way. Now I’m going to explain some of them.

For the first activity there need to be at least two pairs of people. The members of each pair have to be sitting in a single line and the one that is behind has to pretend that his arms are his partner´s arms. So once the two pairs are prepared, they will have to play a role such as pretending to be in a job interview, while the audience (the rest of the class) asks them questions.

In addition, in the next activity the students will form groups of four to six people. Then, two of them will be playing a role in which they are friends and for example, they are talking about the last holidays of one of them. While they are speaking the rest of the group members have to perform what the others are saying.

In conclusion, I think that these two activities can easily be done with primary students and also, they can be used as a cross-curricular activity, in order to review and learn almost every topic that they study at class in any other subject.

I have to be sincere and tell you that the first time I heard it I thought “that’s a joke and it can’t be true, how we can’t teach children how to write with pen and paper? Are the Finnish teachers crazy this morning?”.

Then I start thinking deeply about it and that it could be a reasonable option to change our methodology of learning how to write because we do almost everything with our “smart-devices”, so practically we don’t need to write in a paper. Also in schools, nowadays with the ICT in class we don’t need to spend lot of time making photocopies to class, we just find a webpage and the classroom projector do all the effort for us showing it to all the students, and to fill it, the students only have to stand up and touch with their finger the digital whiteboard and write the correct answer.

Finnish government said that they will make that change in September 2016 (for the 2016/2017 course). Maybe in Spain we need more time to apply it in a school. First of all, we need to apply at all the ICT in schools because not all the classes have one and not all the teachers know how to use it correctly, so first we need to improve this.

When we had done it, the next step could be the tablets for every child, so they can do their homework at home or in class in their tablet, so they don’t have to carry to class and go back home with a lot of books and notebooks, they only need their tablet!

Then, the third step could be the one the Finnish people will do in 2016: starting to teach children how to write in their tablets rather than in paper. Because they will use more those devices than paper at that year.

Apart from the children learning, we have to think that how much words do we write in a paper and how much do we write in our “smart-devices”. If you think on it, I’m sure that we spend more time writing in our smartphone or in our computer than writing in a paper. For example:

• We can write our grocery list in our Google Keep app rather than in a sticky note
• Create a mind map using the Evernote app rather than doing it a paper
• Talk to our cousin in France by the Skype app rather than sending him a letter
• Write a post to tell the world our thinking about something using a WordPress blog rather than publishing it in a newspaper

Do you imagine the next step of the education to implement the ICT in schools? Do you imagine a world without school bags? And without “physical” schools? We can imagine, but there is something that will never disappear: teachers.

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!