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.
