I CAN TELL IT

CAN YOU TELL IT? 

If you are one of my 4^th year Primary Teacher Training Students (Bilingual Group) partners, I am very sure you and I CAN TELL IT!

First of all I have to say that I am very proud of all of you but especially of all the members of my group. We worked hard for this project, and the result could not be any better!

At first sight, it might look a crazy idea, because in the same workshop we must include a fairy tale to motivate students to keep reading, some ICT activities, nine children and 20 minutes to develop everything! But…No, it isn’t crazy… I CAN TELL IT! And you will tell it too if you KEEP READING! 

My group was composed by nine girls and our fairy tale was that classic one called Three little pigs! We thought of it because the story is very simple, short and it teaches a meaningful moral value.

The children who came to participate in our workshops, were from 2^nd year Primary Children from Daoiz y Velarde State school. They were told at school, that a Boring Wizard blew all the pages of books. Therefore, the fairy tales characters forgot their identity. So the goal of these smart students was helping them (or us) to remember who they (or we) were by retelling the story again.

To contextualize the story and to give the students some clues, we decorated our classroom as if it was a forest. As you can see in the picture, we pasted colorful flowers, birds, butterflies and leaves on the walls.  We also, included some grass and a big tree with a poster which said that the Wolf was being wanted. Moreover, we played some forest environment music.

First, Lucía, Carla and I (the Three little pigs) sang a song describing us and ending with the question: Who are we?, the pupils were supposed to answer  (and they all did it): a piiiiiig! And then, we said: yes…a pig, but we are, 1, 2, 3…so we are… and they said: The three little pigs! Right after that, we pointed to the poster, and described the wolf, and asked them who he was. They, again, said: the wooolf, so we asked them if he was good or bad. When they said that he was bad, the wolf entered and they all got a little scared of him… (They were just so cute…)This idea of making a dialogue was inspired in what we learnt last year with Omar de la Cruz. 

Here you can see the song I just told you about:

Did you like it?

When the wolf left, the students, helped the three little pigs to remember the whole story. We designed three different activities with a free and useful program called Edelim. We learned how to use it in 1^st course with Inmaculada Tello. The activities were about matching pictures and putting them in order. You can see them below:

Then, in groups, they had to build the house of one pig (As it is showed in the picture) and invent another end in order to not letting the wolf destroy their houses. For this activity, we included some friends: a fairy, a mouse and a lion. Finally the students all had very good ideas, and the three little pigs were safe in their own houses, from the Big bad wolf! 

To end the activity, we played and sang the song again and dance all together with the children. We could see that pupils enjoyed it very much, which made us be happy and proud of our job. I do not have a video of this to show you, but I have another video in which you will see many of my classmates dancing our song during the break! 

TAKE CARE MY READERS!

RTR LIBRARY!

HELLO MY BLOGGERS!

To be honest, I did not have any idea about what to talk this time about. After thinking for a big while, I decided to talk about the library project that my group and I designed. I think that it is a very good one and even if we already showed it to you, as I endear it, I am going to give you further information just in case some things weren’t very clear.

First of all, our library is called RTR. This is because it is Ready to Read since it consists on a mobile library, being easily moved from class to class or even to the playground or any space at the school. This way the same library could be used by every class participating in the project.

As you might remember, our library had three shelves with for boxes in each one. These boxes would be made with shoes carton boxes and covered with different color papers. Each color represents a genre which has a poster of that color on the notes board. This way children could paste post-its with their comments there, and also the next learner who is willing to read a book can see the comments made on it.

Then, I would like to mention how we planned to get our books from. Firstly, at the beginning of the course, we would ask to the children to buy one different book each one and bring it to school taking into account that the teacher made a list before including appropriate books) Moreover, teachers would also assign one to each child, in order to not have the same book twice. Secondly, pupils would have as homework, to write what they have done during the summer, Christmas, Easter… Then, the teacher would collect all of them and build for example, The Summer book of the class and so on. The teacher will build the book making holes on the pages and joining them with wool. Then they will be on a box on the worktop. Thirdly, we would also ask older children from the school to donate their books from when they were younger, and finally, the teacher would also ask for some books to some English Texbooks Publishers.

Lastly, I would like to talk about some of the activities we thought of. One of them consist on pasting a sticker on the books when students finish reading it. They would paste a star sticker if they have read it and a heart sticker if they have read it and also liked it. This way at the end of the course, it would be noticeable to know which book has been more read and the favorite one. This way, at the end of the course, children will represent the story of their favorite book to their parents as a play. Another one, which I really endear is based on the idea where students from 2nd course write on a template which book they will like to read to a younger child and students from 1st course will write on another template which book they will like to hear from an older student. This way, once a month the teacher will open the mailbox and choose (from a raffle) from those children that picked the same book, a couple to go together the break and read the book.

To end, I would like to mention that I think you all made a great job with this project. Congratulations! You all had brilliant ideas and you know what? I think that if we all were working at the same school, children will enjoy going to school very much, don’t you think so?