Fairy tales workshop

This is the last post of this year and I would love to talk about a project we carried out with more than 50 children from a primary school.

 

The aim of this workshop was to help students to retell popular fairy tales. In my group we decided to work with Cinderella, so we prepared lots of materials to contextualise the classroom for this fairy tale. The point of this workshop was to design a book where the fairy tale was written but there were some gaps for the pictures related to the text. Once the book was created we copied it five times so we have one book for every two or three kids. The intention of it is that the teacher first reads the fairy tale to the students and then they have to read it aloud and chose the photo that better matches with each paragraph. It was a very successful activity and the children had a lot of fun as we were all dressing up as the characters of Cinderella and there was a great fairy tales atmosphere.

In this activity with students, I realised about the huge different English level that exists between students from the same classroom. I asked every student if they practice English at home or just in the school and the ones who told me they practice English at home with their parents or in an English academy, obviously could speak better English than the others. For that reason some workshops took a little bit longer than others.

My conclusion of this workshop with children at this age is that every child is a different world, therefore is really important to work with multiples intelligences in primary education to elicit positive responses in every single student.

WHY TO CREATE A LIBRARY IN THE CLASSROOM?

All literature, and literacy, is born from the human need to tell stories, to tell stories about one self or about others, to tell stories about the world to better understand our existence, the others and the universe we live in. All the stories, the myths, the fables and the novels, including those addressed to children are, in fact, the result of this wish and this basic need: they help us to live, to survive; they help children to grow up and develop.

I honestly believe that create a library in the classroom is a great idea to encourage children to read books, but we have to be careful because children in Primary Education are in a critical age in which they might love reading book or they might hate it. That is why I am going to share some ideas of how to create a library in the classroom. At the beginning of the course, we should collect a small amount of money (1 or 2 Euros) from the parents or ask them to bring a few English books appropriate for the age.

In the classroom we have to create an adequate space for the library where the children feel comfortable and relax while choosing a book or reading. It is easy for instance, we can cover some boxes with colourful papers to differentiate the classification of the books and place them in a corner on the floor level as the children can reach the books without the help of an adult. Then we should put some blankets and cushions in the corner around the boxes with the books, in this way the children feel as being in a different space of the classroom where instead of sitting in a chair you are sitting on a cushion on the floor and it should be decorated as the special place it is, with images of fairy tales, cultural things, daily situations, etc. All this is focused on how motivate children to read because without their motivation we cannot help them to read, first somehow we need to motivate them to read anything that they are interested in and once we can see they already enjoy with the reading, then it is time to guide them through some adequate books but always suggesting and never enforcing.

Reading strategies

In this post, I am going to focus on some reading strategies that can help us in a CLIL lesson. I just choose some of the strategies, actually I pick those ones that I think that are easier to implement in a lesson with English as a second language. All these strategies are using scaffolding technics as activate pre-knowledge, schemata, discourse frames, contextualizing or think-pair-share.

 

 

Question Chart: Improving Reading Comprehension through Questioning

This strategy consists of asking questions the children about a book but just giving little clues, like showing the cover, telling some attributes about the main character or reading a few pages of the book. The questions can be formulated by the teacher or the students, by wondering what is going to happen next. Once they find the answer in the book, they have to reason the answer with the support of the book.

In this process the pupils have to make predictions, activating their own schema with their previous knowledge/experiences.

We can give discourse frames to facilitate the questions for example why, what, when, where, who and how.

 

 

Story Bits: Retelling Stories to Build Strategies in Real Reading and Real Writing

Here the students have to guess what is the story about just looking at the cover. This is a warm up to activate their schema. After that, the teacher reads the whole story, so it is time to start with the activities.

First activity is a brainstorm in pairs about what happened in the story following this order; beginning, middle and end.

In the second activity every student has to re-write the story in one page. As there is not enough room in one page they should summarize it.

Finally the students share the story with the rest of the classroom.

VIDEO

 

Interactive Story Retelling: Encouraging Retelling with Picture Supports

We can this strategy to encourage the children to retell the story with pictures supports. The firs step is to involve all the students in the story. It is easy if we give a picture of any character of the story to each pupil, so when I am telling the story and a new character appears, the student with the picture sticks it on the blackboard. Now the students can re-tell the story with the help of all the visuals we have been using (pictures).

Finally we give all the pictures used in the story to each student so they can use it to re-tell the story to a classmate or even at home.

 

Engaging in Reading

We need to choose an already known story for the kids and after re-telling to them, ask questions about what happened at the beginning of the story, in the middle and to the end.

Once we have refreshed the story, the students have to choose their favourite part of the story and draw a picture, as next day they will have to write a little story about what is happening in their picture and share with the rest.

 

Building Reading Comprehension: Five Senses Story Reading

This strategy consist of using the five senses to activate and connect the previous knowledge of the students with the story. The pupils have to predict was going to happen in the next page, but this prediction is made through the senses as we should ask the pupils questions related to both, the story and the senses. For example, you make a noise related to the story and ask, what is that noise?

 

Sentence Starters: Making Text-to-Self Connections

When we support the students with these sentence starters (reminds me of, etc.), we are helping them to activate the schema of their previous knowledge and experiences which help them to understand the story better. It is very important to have into account that the schema is different in everyone.

Storytelling in a CLIL lesson

Storytelling has always been a great way to teach about life, about ourselves and about others as the students develop understanding, appreciation and respect for other cultures, and can encourage a positive attitude to people with different religions, beliefs, races, etc.

In this post I want to focus on the storytelling as a tool for a CLIL lesson and how can we use the story to make easier the access not just to language and content but to culture and cognition.

Content

The stories are very often linked to a daily life experiences but they also cope with topics related to curricular content (family, animals, culture, history, etc.) and it may assist to present, practice, consolidate or extend children´s knowledge.

Communication

Stories also increase children´s interaction and communication not just with the teacher but also with the classmates. We can use a story to bridges and understand a second language but also as a fantastic source of content which, little by little, will prepare students for the interaction and communication about a huge variety of topics.

Culture

To use stories in the classroom can prepare the students for awareness, openness, tolerance and acceptance towards other ways of understanding life as stories are open windows to the world. Therefore, with the stories the students can learn their own culture and other cultures.

Cognition

Stories demand guessing, predicting or searching for meaning and connecting it to previous knowledge in a topic. From this point of view, stories come to be scaffolding tools for the learning process in the sense of:

1.       Stories are a partly familiar framework that can support the children by listening to or reading about a topic.

2.       With the stories, students construct their own knowledge step by step.

·         Retelling or remembering the storyline, both individually and in group, can increase learner´s cognitive and social skills.

·         Identifying characters, comparing behaviours, contrasting actions or defining terms or concepts, develop concrete thinking skills.

·          Reasoning, finding alternative and creative endings or solutions, evaluating happenings or attitudes may also improve creative and abstract thinking.

 

 

How to use a story in class

A story should be clear and have plenty of repetitions, providing opportunities for participation and helpful illustrations and should have an appropriate language level.

 

Before the lesson.

The teacher needs to choose if the story is going to be narrated or read. Both are good options but the stories produce a different atmosphere that connect to the old tradition of storytelling and allows the teacher to keep eye-contact and adjust his input by animating her language.

The teacher should practice the storytelling before the lesson to find the difficulties that may appear. For example, replacing the words “boa constrictor” to “snake” can make the story easier to understand to young learners.

 

During the lesson.

·         Pre-storytelling stage.

In this stage we have to prepare the students to understand the story. It involves increasing their interest and motivation and creating a meaningful context so the children can use their previous knowledge and experiences to understand better the story (schema).

             Lastly, we should introduce the new vocabulary in order to help for the next stage.

·         While-storytelling stage.

The aim in this stage is to capture the children´s interest, keeping their attention and helping them to understand the story. There are some activities which make the students active participants in the storytelling as guessing the continuation of the story, identifying characters, possible justifications, etc.

We can also create activities which include movement as giving cards with characters or objects in the story so the students have to stand up whenever they hear their character assigned in the card

·         After-storytelling stage.

Finally, in this stage we should check student´s understanding and to engage further with the topic introduced in the story either through content-related activities or by relating them to the student´s own life. The story may act as a trampoline for many curricular activities.

For more information about storytelling in a CLIL lesson check here

 

The birth of Jazz Chants

Carolyn Graham is considered the creator of the jazz chants. She was teaching ESL in New York University during the day and playing piano and singing old jazz in the night. So she realized that this music has a very strong one, two, three and four pitch. One night she was playing in a pub and someone came and told her “cheers, good to see you. You look wonderful!” and she imagined one, two, three, four. Next day in the university she asks for a big empty room and she organized a free lesson for every student who wants to practice the English language with jazz. Jazz chants just born.

Carolyn Graham develops her chants simply by listening. You don´t create anything, you just have to listen to the language all around you. You operate the language that we use every day, nothing fancy or complicated. Natural spoken English with an awareness of the rhythm.

 It has a lot of advantages, one of the big ones is that you can work with any size classroom and you don´t need any equipment, all you need is yourself

It must be real, useful and appropriate language for each age and you can use it with everybody at any level

Formulas for a vocabulary chant:

Step one: Take a topic, for an instance, fruits

Step two: Write down ten words related to the topic

Step three: Separate the words according to the number of sounds (most of the words are going to be one, two or three sounds)

Step four: Follow the sound´s pattern 2 – 3 – 1 by picking from the list one word with 2 sounds, another word with 3 sounds and one more word with 1 sound.

2 sounds: Che-rry

3 sounds: Pine-a-pple

1 sound:  Plum

Start with the chant!

Cherry, pineapple, plum

Cherry, pineapple, plum

Cherry, pineapple

Cherry, pineapple

Cherry, pineapple, plum

With that pattern you can write any chant (animals, food, body parts, etc) and you can add words to the chant, for example:

Purple cherry, yellow pineapple

Purple cherry, yellow pineapple

Purple cherry, yellow pineapple

And violet plum!

And violet plum!

Jazz chants are an innovative way to teach spoken English. At the beginning I thought it was just to teach vocabulary and pronunciation but after this post I realize that  you can also learn grammar and structures creating more complex chants. For example:

May I turn down the air conditioning?

Do you mind if I lower the blind?

Is that alright if I put away this staff?

I don´t mind, I don´t mind, I don´t mind!

Is it alright if I switch off the light?

Do you mind if I close the door?

May I switch off the fun?

Sure, sure, sure!

In this chant the students can learn apart from vocabulary and pronunciation some structures about how to make a question in a very polite way.

May I … ?

Do you mind if … ?

Is that alright if … ?

As you can see, you have to play with the rhythm, that’s why I choose to change the order of the sentence in the second part of the chant

(1) May I turn down the air conditioning?

(2) Do you mind if I lower the blind?

(3) Is it alright if I put away this staff?

I don´t mind, I don´t mind, I don´t mind!

(3) Is it alright if I switch off the light?

(2) Do you mind if I close the door?

(1) May I switch off the fun?
 

Sure, sure, sure!

You can use any content in a jazz chant so you can develop any cross-curricular área.

Here there is a video of an original Carolyn´s chant

Eric Carle

“With many of my books I attempt to bridge the gap between the home and school. To me home represents, or should represent; warmth, security, toys, holding hands, being held. School is a strange and new place for a child. Will it be a happy place? There are new people, a teacher, classmates—will they be friendly?”
Eric Carle

Eric Carle was born in USA on 1929 and he is an American designer, illustrator, and writer of children's books. He has written and illustrated more than 70 books.

Eric Carle´s pictures are considered by many as art and his works are very easily recognizable as he created it in collage technique by using hand-painted papers which he cuts and layers to form bright and colourful pictures. He also added in some books die-cut pages to make them more attractive and many other techniques like for an instance, twinkling lights in some pages to do an impression of a real firefly or the real sound of a cricket. For more information about how Carle creates his pictures access here

He usually focused on themes related to nature as it´s an interest shared by most small children. In this way, his books are not only entertaining but also educational as the children have the opportunity to learn something about the world around them.

The point of his great success, apart from his artwork, is that when Carle writes, he tries to recognize children´s feelings and creativity, and also to stimulate their intellectual growth.

His most popular book is The Very Hungry Caterpillar which is a picture book in where a caterpillar eats his way through a wide variety of food before pupating and emerging as a butterfly.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar include distinctive collage illustrations, “eaten” holes in the pages and very simple text with educational themes – counting, the days of the week, foods, and a butterfly's life stages.
It has been described as having sold the equivalent of a copy per minute since its publication. For more info access here