Drama Queen

Hello my dear Bilinguals!

Today’s entry is very special and will give many meaningful activities to work with children, not only they will work on English but also in many intrapersonal and interpersonal skills. I am talking about drama.

For this purpose, I am going to describe some of the different activities that we have been doing during our today’s class with scaffolding methods and additional resources. I will focus on simple activities to prepare the students and some others related to comprehension.

1.     Warm up!

Working with drama and kinaesthetic skills is a great opportunity for children to develop their self-esteem by expressing feelings or show their hidden skills. Nevertheless, there are many children that can be afraid of acting or simply talking in front of their peers. For this reason, if we as teachers want to work this aspect, we have to be very carefully and organise the lesson following a progression. That is what our teacher has done with us.

The first activity consists of having all the students walking through an open area (the school gym or the playground would be great). The aim for students is walking while they pretend to do an action or to be someone else. When the teacher says FREEZE, everyone must stop and explain what is he doing or who is he/she.

How applause makes you feel? Encourage the students to go up into a stage or something upper than the floor for introducing themselves and say something, whatever they want. Then, their peers will give him/her a big applause.

2.     Comprehension

The body is powerful tool that can help students to understand better a concept. This is true if we take into account that there are many children whose highest intelligence is the one called Kinaesthetic Intelligence. There are many simple activities that work on comprehension of concepts or even stories. Let me show you some of them.

Ask for four volunteers. Two of them would be sitting in a chair (students A) and the other two would be behind them, only showing their arms behind the shoulders of the two first. (Students B).

 It sound tricky but is that simple as this picture shows:

Then pretend as the rest of the classmates were the audience of a TV show, and the two volunteers that are sitting down were two popular celebrities. At this point, the aim is to simulate and interview between the audience and the TV Stars.

The role of the students B is to express with their own arms what the student A is answering without seeing his face or knowing his answers.

* Scaffolding point: There are many possibilities to this activity for working children comprehension. For instance, leaving the interview setting, the students can have prepared the questions for the celebs beforehand and the celebs can have prepared their role and their story. It is a good opportunity to work with types of questions, how to make it and how to answer it, and oral speeches.

Ask for some volunteers and you as the teacher have to give them a story and a situation. After that, the volunteers go in front the rest of the class and represent that final situation. The only rule for them is not to talk, they only can make gestures. The rest of the students must guess what had happened and how the characters have come to that end by asking questions. 

*Scaffolding point: to support the comprehension, the characters can show different real pictures or elements according to the story to help the students finding the story. In addition, the teachers can give the students some starting situation and from that situation, students must guess the end. For the language scaffolding, there can be little posters on the class’ wall that help the students to remember how to make question, for instance.

Time to put it all in a nutshell

As you can see, there are many different ways to work with drama, improvisation and movement and it can helpful if we want to improve skills such as comprehension of stories or situations. Furthermore, it may be a tool for children’s socialization as communication among them is promoted.

What do you think about working with drama in a CLIL classroom? Can you think about more benefits for students? Can you find any negative point?

Keep tuned for more didactic resources!

And Merry Christmas my little bilinguals!

Alice in Wonderland WORKSHOP

Hello my dear Bloggers!

Today I wan to share with you an Amazing activity that took place at the Centro Universitario Cardenal Cisneros, the place where I am preparing my training to become a teacher.

I Can Tell It! Project

This big activity was composed by six Workshops. In each workshop there were almost 8 of us (the students) and 8-9 real children…REAL ONES! It is the first time that we work with children at the University and it was great. Everyone was very exiting about this project and for this reason the Centro created a hastag on Twitter (#cuccicantellit), so if you want to see some photos and discover our feelings about this project, I strongly recommend you to go to Twitter and look for the hastag.

Our aim in this project was to help the children retell popular fairy tales using ICT. My group and I chose Alice in Wonderland.

Welcome to Wonderland

The workshop that we prepared was structure as follows:

Warm-up

My partner Ana, dressed as she were Alice, is asleep and she just wake up. She told the children that she has have a very strange dream but she could not remember it and ask for help to children to find out what was her dream about.

The White Rabbit

Immediately, children meet Marina, dressed as she were the White Rabbit. From this moment to the end of the workshop, the white rabbit will be guiding the children into de mysterious world of Wonderland.

The White Rabbit starts telling the beginning of the tale to the children and she will stop when Alice fell through a hole. At that moment the White Rabbit will ask the children to look for help to follow the story.

Door, Key, Bottle…

In this moment, children meet me and the first activity begins.

We all sit down in a semicircle and I start telling them the next part of the tale, how Alice enters into Wonderland. Can you remember that part of the tale?

While I am telling the story, I show them some pictures taken from the Disney film “Alice in Wonderland”.

When I finish that part of the story, I leave the images on the floor and I begin to show one of these flashcards you can see below.

The activity consist on matching that image with the name of the object or the action that appears in the image.

With this activity, we are contextualising the story by showing them pictures and we are promoting the association of a word with its meaning through the context of the story itself.

Merry Merry Unbirthday

The White Rabbit grab the attention of the children again and takes the children to another scene of the tale, the Tea Party.

My partners Javier and Miguel, dressed as they were the Mad Hatter and March Hare, invite the children to their particular “Unbirthday Party”. The activity consists of the famous Chair Game. The known Unbirthday song is playing while the children sing it. At the same time they have to turn around a group of chairs singing and dancing. When the music stops, the have to take one chair and sit on it.

The aim of this activity has to do with the kinaesthetic intelligence. It is a dynamic activity where children can run and have fun while there are improving some phonemes and pronunciation while they are listening and singing a song.

Red Roses Race

The person in charge of this activity is Maria, and she is pretending to be the evil Queen of Hearts. Now, children are divided in two groups and they must form a line. In front of them there are two rosebushes with white roses on them.

Children have to run towards the rosebushes one by one, draw a red cross on a rose and take a little piece of paper that is behind the rose.

When the two teams finish crossing white roses, they will have on their tables a sentence from the evil queen. Children will have to order the sentence and read it in loud voice if they do not want to lose their heads.

Who's been painting my roses red? 

WHO'S BEEN PAINTING MY ROSES RED?

Who dares to taint,

With vulgar paint,

The royal flower bed?

For painting my roses red

Someone will lose his head.

Alice remembers

Children now know some of the adventures that Alice has lived in her dream. So children come back to Alice and they will try to order some photos that she has about her dream.

Finally, Alice will be relieved to remember all this episodes of her dreams thanks to the children.

Here you have some pics of the great time we had doing this project:

Finally the result was good. However, it is true that things do not usually go as you imagine, there are a lot of factor to take into account when working with children. Welcome to Magisterio I guess.

How were your workshops? What do you think about our activities? How can we improve them?

The Balanced Literacy Diet

Hello little teachers!

In today’s post I want to show you a web page I recently found where there is a wide variety of resources for teachers concerning to reading.

THE BALANCED LITERACY DIET

How the web page was born?

The idea of creating this site came up from a non-profit organization called The Melissa Institute. This organization is aimed to prevent violence through education by proposing the application of a research-based knowledge on it. Literacy experts from The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, school-based specialists and classroom teachers are in charge of these researches and the application of them in a scholar setting.

The idea was born due to different researches about youth violence which gave some surprising and shocking results. One of them states that 85% of young people in troubles with the law have reading difficulties. For this reason, this investigation states that children unable to read or with severe reading difficulties by the age of 8 years old are more likely to develop low self-esteem, to leave school and engage in antisocial and aggressive behaviour.

You have to take into account that this study was made in the USA, however children development cannot be very different in both sides of the Atlantic Sea.

In an attempt to prevent literacy failure and all it entails, The Melissa Institute opened this site to provide educators all over the world a resource to support the development of reading and writing in children.

The Balanced Literacy Diet

As you can notice, in the name of the page appears the word “diet” and maybe you are wondering about the relationship between Literacy and food. Stop breaking your brain looking for the relation, there is no such a thing. The authors of the page have created a thematic framework based on cooking because they want us to be aware of the importance of Literacy through the “ingredients” of literacy, the importance of “nourishing” students with the different “recipes” of lesson plans or the “food groups” of literacy.

Content

Moving on to the content of the page, we can find different tabs in the upper part of the page. Here you have a glimpse of them:

Food Groups: in this section it can be found all the aspects involved in literacy. It is divided into the following 17 blocks. They are shown as they were food pyramids for reading and writing.

Introduction Stages of literacy development Motivation for literacy Oral language and ELL Knowledge building Vocabulary Phonemic awareness Letter-sound phonics

Spelling and word study Concepts of print Reading fluency and expression Reading comprehension strategies Writing processes and strategies Text structure and genres Writing conceptions Classroom tips Assessment

              

In each block, there are quotes of experts talking about the topic of the block, an overview of it and how we can teach and assess it.

Recipe finder: in this section there is a great amount of activities, resources and materials or how they call them “recipes” divided by each primary grade and kindergarten. It can be found a lot of videos explaining each activity or resource in every block.

Virtual tours: This section is divided according to the three cycles and here you can make a virtual visit to the classroom of all the teachers involved in this project. It can be helpful for a teacher to organize the space in his/her class.

How to videos: This tab redirects you to the YouTube’s playlist they have where you can find all the reading strategies we were watching at class, do you remember?

Final reflexion

I hope I had been able to grab your attention to this webpage and make you feel curios to discover all it has to offer. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND IT!

Nowadays, technological advances are amazing and sometimes difficult to believe, but they are real. For this reason, we 21^st century teachers have an incredible box with many resources that can help us to develop our task properly and in the best way we can to accomplish our mission. The only thing that we have to do to open it starts by writing “www.”

Have you heard about this webpage? What do you think about the relationship between literacy and youth violence? Have you find useful the materials that the webpage propose? Do you think teachers should use online materials and proposals?

I would like to know your opinion about it so leave a comment! =)

Creating fairy tale characters!

The other day in class we were talking about fairy tale characters.

The structure of the class was as follows:

Warming-up

Our teacher Raquel asked us to think about our favourite fairy tale character and we have to discuss it in pairs. After some minutes she asked us to share our character with the rest of the class. A lot of characters came up as for example Pocahontas, Tinker Bell, Aladin’s Genius… as you can see they are not fairy tale characters but Disney characters. However, our teacher let us work with them.

The problem in my case was not remembering any tale apart from ‘Little red riding hood’, for this reason here you have some web pages that I found where you can find old and new tales for children.

Tales in Spanish: here

                             here

                             

Tales in English: here

                           here

List of fairy tales according with its region: wikipedia

 Theoretical part

After the warming-up, Raquel gave us a worksheet where there was a table with different characters motifs and its description. Here you can see the table. It has been adapted from here.  

We had to fill the table with characters we knew that met the description given.

The activity

Now is our turn. We have to create a fairy tale character and for doing it here we have a new resource that I have loved: TRADING CARDS 

It is a web resource for creating a kind of identity card for fictional or real characters among others. Here you can see how it works:

As you can see, the card is divided into some blocks as description of the character, insights, development, his interactions in the world and the last block ask the author to express his personal connection with the new born character.  

Time to reflect

I think this activity is great not only as a resource for teacher but also for the students work.

For teachers, it gives many possibilities to work with them. For instance, some activities come to my mind as the followings:

1. Creating a character based on the students or even an antagonist helping them to reflect on their own characteristics
2. Creating in small groups a short story with original characters
3. In groups, each of them can create a character and create an improvised story with the characters of the other groups.

For students, trading cards make the job of creating characters easier allowing the creation of a rich character. The cards offer the possibility of covering some important aspect that must be taken into account if students want a character with a deep personality. Also, it makes easier for the student to think about the way a character can act in a story since all his thoughts, feelings and goals has been developed in the card.

Time for questions…

What do you think about the idea of Trading Cards? Can you see them useful? Can you think about more activities to work with them? 

                                                                                       

Maurice Sendak and the research activity

At last! My first post has come!

And as a welcome, I want to introduce all of you into de magical and illustrative world of a great author of children’s literature, Maurice Sendak.

Why Maurice Sendak?

The idea born from our teacher of children’s literature, she wrote some authors’ names on the blackboard and, in groups, we had to choose one of them and make a little research about his life and his main works. And my group chose Sendak.
The rest of the authors were Julia Donaldson, Eric Carle, Beatrix Potter, E.B. White, David Shannon, Marc Brown, Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss and A.A. Milne. Just if you want to know more children literature's authors. The idea was to create a Great Authors Contest.

However, I must comment that the moment I saw all those names, I get a little bit shocked because I did not know any of them, even their names were unfamiliar to me. In that moment my teacher said: “By the moment you write their names on Google, you will know who they are”. My group and I were dying of curiosity so we started the research immediately.

What we found out?

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) is an American illustrator and writer of children’s literature.

He started reading books at an early age because during his childhood he spent most of the time laid down in bed due to healthy problems. Here started his love for reading but when he was 12 and he saw Fantasia by Walt Disney, he decided he wanted to be an illustrator.

That is how a brilliant career began.

The most common known work of Sendak is the picture book Where the Wild Things Are released in 1963. The images of the book are visually rich and they have an impressive narrative power. In addition, in the story it can be found different hidden topics as domination, freedom, wishes, darkness, dreams, forbidden dreams and nightmares.

This book has been adapted into other media several times where I can point out the film released in 2009. Here you can see the trailer for you to create the idea of the images and the topics it treats.

Another important work is the book Outside Over There, written and illustrated by Sendak. It had been used as inspiration for the film Labyrinth (1986) performed by Jennifer Conelly and David Bowie.

The activity…

Once the information was collected, we had to create a visual presentation to tell our classmates this info. At the end, we had to add why we think our author is relevant and try to persuade our peers to vote for him. The reason why is because next day in class we will vote for the best author. I will keep you informed about the result! (There were no winners, there was a tie between Roald Dahl, Julia Donaldson and Eric Carle)

To finish, I would like to summarize briefly why I think this type of activity is good to develop in class.

-          It makes us create our own knowledge about a topic instead of listening during hours to the teacher.

-          Each member of the group can feel as an expert about his author giving self-confident to them in the moment to defend it in front of the class.

-          At the end, all the members of the class know important information about each topic (authors in this case), they can reflect on it and chose the “best one” giving arguments.


Turn for questions...

What do you think about this activity? In which sense do you think is good for our formation as a bilingual teacher? Can you see any CLIL tools used in it?