Using films in classroom.

This week we have learned with Raquel how we can use films in classroom as a way of teaching.We were remember about how we worked with films when we were children and the majority of these answers were that teachers used films like a prize or award when we had a good behavior or when we finished a topic, but not as a way of teaching.Moreover we did not do anything with the films , we only watched it and even sometimes it was a time to sleep.


From my point of view, films are a great resource for teachers to use with students,because with films, children are able to maintain the attention in a story; moreover, they are able to make a summary of the film when they finish of watching it,and it means that they have understand it.
Teachers should use the advantages of learning using films,instead watching them like  a prize.
When i was young I remember when we had a history exam at teh school, that sometimes i looked for the film about the event which i had to study and films help me a lot to retain the information about the event.It was a great method for learning!I am sure that you have done it sometime too!

These are some advantages about the use of films in classroom.

-Improved visual literacy

-Enhanced understanding of how to construct a narrative which is useful across the curriculum

-Greater sense of relevance to education

-Better understanding of our media

-Enhanced discussion skills

-Improved self-esteem and self-confidence

-Greater appreciation of culture and democratic society

-Increased sense of enfranchisement and citizenship.

-Research skills

-Analysis skills

-Team-working skills

- Planning skills

- Organization skills

- Flexible thinking and multi-tasking skills

- Problem-solving skills

- Personal motivation skills

- Computing, communication and technology skills skills

-Criticism and self-criticism (including peer-reviewing skills) skills

-Social awareness skills

-Moral responsibility skills

-Presentation (both personal and project-related) skills.

When we put that in practice, we were watching Mulan and Raquel made a set of groups and each group had a question about the film which we have to be able to answers when we finish it. These are some examples of these questions:

-What the role’s men in this film? How they are depicted? What are their qualities? What are their weaknesses?

-What the role’s women in this film? How they are depicted? What are their qualities? What are their weaknesses?

-Who is the hero is the story? What is her/his conflict?

-What is the moral of the story?

-….

Then, we had to join the groups to summarize the information about the question and then share this information to all the class.To finalize here i give you my favourite part of the film:

This activity surprise to me because we can see the plenty of topics that appear in the film which we have to talk about in classroom with children. In mi opinion is a great way to learn! What do you think? Can you tell me another way to use films in classroom?

Readers Theatre

Hello again! I want to share with you the activity which we had developed today in the seminar with Raquel.
Readers theatre is a joint dramatic reading from a text.It consists on make a vocal representation of a text with different characters. The actors not have to memorize the text, and they do not have to do any movement, only read it and use vocal expression to make it more striking and intense, moreover to help the audience to understand the story.

There are so many good reasons for using this method in classrooms with children:

1.       To reinforce reading ability.

2.       To reinforce vocabulary by using words in context.

3.       To improve the intonation and the pronunciation.

4.       To improve the cooperative work.

5.       It can include SEN integration because there are many roles available.

6.       To improve the confidence.

7.       It’s a strategy for developing reading fluency.

We had been practicing among the classmates and it was a great experience in which we can really involve in the context. We had started with a text of first cycle of primary education and each of us had one character. First we had to read it carefully and underlain the words which we consider important to emphasize them. Then, Raquel gave us another text, very similar but with more information and we did the same with it. At the end of the class what most surprise to me is that we had memorized the contents without realizing. What was more difficult for me was to look to the audience sometimes, because I was losing the text, but with two times practicing it was perfect!

Here I leave you a web page in which you can found a lot of different stories to make roles with your students moreover you can take ideas of how to use this method.

http://www.thebestclass.org/rtscripts.html

And finally these are two amazing examples for me of children doing readers theater:

      

Do you like this tool? Will you use it with your future students?I will do it sure!I hope you enjoy my post !

Frozen frames

  

Frozen frames, also known as tableaux or snapshots, consist in to freeze and action of literacy, film, tale, history etc. with their bodies, so students can the opportunity to study this action in a more deep way. They are a very interesting tool for children to learn new contents.

It is a way to improve the students’ vocabulary because when students are work in groups to create their own frozen frame, they have to speak in English and repeat the concepts which they are going to represent and the location vocabulary (after, before, between etc.)

 It seem to me a very interesting and creative way to children for understanding in a funny way vocabulary, concepts or topic and also is important that they are involve in the scene, so there are going to be a part of what they have to learn. Moreover help student with their social skills, body expression, to lose the shyness and of course passing good time learning.

The steps which we seen in classroom for creating your own frozen fame are the follows:

1-Think about a scene depicted in one popular fairy tale.

2-Find as many classmates as characters are needed to show the scene you have selected.

3-Choose an appropriate physical space to show your scene.

4-Look for props, costumes, objects, etc. which help to make the scene more real.

5-Rehearse in the physical space you have chosen, and be ready for the great day!

As we were talking in class, frozen frames, can also be used to learn concepts of history, social science and literature among others in which for example the students build a scene of a war and the rest of the student of the class have to make question to guess what war is.

Here I give you a web with more information of frozen frames with some examples of how to use them.

http://dramaresource.com/strategies/still-images-a-freeze-frames

Do you know other ways to use frozen frames?

Like a curiosity I want to show you another branch of frozen frame which are freeze frame shots. It is when one shot is printed in a single frame several times in order to create an interesting illusion of a still photograph. One of the best uses of this video effect is during a bar scene in the movie “The Other Guys.” Often times motion-capture cameras are needed to produce the effect.

I hope you like it!

The dark side of Alice In Wonderland

Hello partners!!As you know, we have seen in class that there are so many ways to work with fairy tales, moreover the next week we are going to put it in practice in our I Can Tell It!Project.But in this post I want to show you another branch of fairy tales relate with the different versions of the stories that we all know.

We were seen in class about the differents versions of Cindirella, and it's surprise me a lot, and I found interesting to investigate about another version of my favurite story: Alice in Wonderland, like a curiosity that I would like to share with you.

First of all I would tell you the  origin  of this story:

Lewis Carroll was the writter of the tail Alice in wonderland; Lewis was inspired in a 10 years old girl, called Alice Liddell, to carry out this wanderfull and magic tale.

Alice and Lewis met in 1856, when he was 20 years old and she 4.Lewis and Alice's father were god firends.

On, July 4,1862,in a trip through the river Thames, Alicia asked to Lewis to tell a story for her, and Carroll created in that moment the adventures of a girl to fell to a rabbit hole, Alicia asked to Carroll if he could write this story for her and he did it. 

So was born ''Alice in wonderland''.

Alice died on November 16,1934, but not before confesing in a letter to her niece

 ''I am tired of being Alice in wonderland''

Well, all of us Know the Dysney version of this tale, and also another version which was did by Tim Barton (2010). But...if I told you that the film which you seen was not the original idea of Tim Barton? 

Alice in Wonderland by Tim Barton has been one of the better adaptations that nobody has done about Carroll's tale.Tim Barton was inspirid in a videogame of Alice in Wonderland called ''Alice madness''.In that story, Alice suffers the death of her family in a fire ,Alice went crazy and she was interned in a mental hospital.

There, she is isolated from reality, and creates her own world of wonders.Tim Barton had the intention of creating the film from this game, but Disney producers told him not, because it would be too bloody.

In my opion, as I mendionated at  the beguining of the post, there are so many differents kinds of tales ad so many ways to work with them, like add new characters, change the end , invent another way to scape or to solve the problems of the characters etc.

Finally I leave here a picture of my favourite character and a nice sentence of this character :

'''The way you want to take depends on you wherever you go''

I hope you have enjoyed reading this post !Thank you for your time!

Are children enjoying reading and writing poetry?

What they think about poetry?

In the video below you can found some Spanish answers of this question

When we were young I remember the classes of poetry, I have not found nothing interesting in poems. I saw poems as a way of writing very difficult and it must rhyme. But poetry is more than a group of verses which are not understood and rhyming among them.
There are sentences which produces feelings to the people who read it. All of us make poetry without realizing. Raquel shows to us some sentences of children which I really loved.

These are some examples:

''Love is like a littel old woman and a littel old man who are still friendS even after they know each other so well.''
Tommy- age 6

"You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you

mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it

a lot. People forget,"

Jessica - age 8

"Love is when mommy sees daddy on the toilet and she

doesn't think it's gross."

Mark - age 6

The are a lot of beautiful sentences which children say unconsciously.I am sure if you have some littel brother or sister, nephews or cousins, they sometime have said something that make you fell.Or even you, when you are expressing your feelings to someone or your own feelings and you provoke a reaction in the other person, in that moment you are making poetry.
For that, we must to focus poetry at primary education in different ways, others that reading aloud poems which we do not know what they said, and try to approach poetry to their daily lifes for children fell that they are able to do it.

 I have found in the web so many reasons for reading and writing poetry which maybe are interesting for you.

Poetry does not take long to read. If you do not like to read large stories, you can read a short poem during your coffe break, or while standing in line at the bank, or while eating a sandwich at lunch time.

Poetry improves your vocabulary.One of the most basic reasons to read poetry is that it is a great way to improve your vocabulary.If your ususal reading material consists of magazines, newspaper, and blogs your are unlikely to be encountering any new words.

Poetry gives you new ideas.Poetry can open your mind to new ideas.You might read a poem from a completely different culture, or written by someone much older or much younger than you.Poems are a way to train your mind.

Poetry shows the world in a new light. Poetry can give you another point of view of any topic.

Poetry is fun. Work with poetry can be very fun.It depends in the activity that accompanies the poem.For example the other day with Raquel we were working with poetry in a different way and we really have pass a good time during this class.The teacher has to found the better way to make it easier poetry for children and catch their attention about this branch of literature.

Poetry provides a cultural context and expressive model that supports openness and emotional honesty.

The act of writing a poem is a skill that people can use to help themselves througouht a lifetime.It is a useful tool to vent themselves and to express their feelings.

Work with poetry is a way to improve our creative skills.

I really encourage you to try to do your own poems when you are very sad or very happy for something or someone, because moreover you will feel more relaxed it is when you are more inspirited to do it, and after, when you read it, I am sure that it will surprise you and also it is a nice memory of you for you.

Finally I leave to you another nice video about what is poetry.

Thank you for your time!

Reading

   

Hello everyone!!I want to share this post with you, I hope you like it!

The Reading map is an activity which we have done with Raquel in which we have to try to draw in a map or something similar your experience since we started to read, and accompany it with an essay explaining the picture.

When I was doing the essay I remembered a lot of experiences and events which I had forget. I also remember that when I was at the school I did not like read nothing because my parents an my teacher obliged me to do it. 

In my opinion the problem is that the school does not motivate students with books which they really want to read at least in my case.

Why there are people who do not like reading?          How can we choose an appropriate book?

Well, it depends on your life, your experiences, your family; your friends etc. all around you have influence in what kind of book you will like to read and if you like read or not.

Here I leave some advises to help people which don’t like read. In my opinion this is because they do not found a book that really exited them.

- Books with a strong title which catch your attention and trough it call you to open it a look    inside. Sometimes the title have not nothing similar with the story of the book .It can surprise you lot!

- To read the background of the book maybe helps you to find the story more appropriate for you.

- Another advice for choosing an appropriate book could be that you feel identified with the main character of your book.

- Also is important to choose an appropriate moment and space to read a book because if you have so much deterrents element around you, it is difficult that you focus your mend is the story which you are reading.

•   In these links below you can find good advises to introduce children in reading and also what kind of books are more appropriate for each age.

-  Help your child to choose a book.

-  BookS according ages.

And finally I have found an interesting video with information about Why Should We Read Books.

     

Could you share in this post what are your favourite book and why?

           STORY-TELLING.

The other day Raquel shows us a video which surprised me a lot and I want to share my reflection of this class with you and how you can use it in other ways at the classroom.

The video is << Maik and his chocolate cake>>

It consists in to tell a story and accompany it with gestures in order to make easier for the listener who is following the story.

When I saw it the first time I was not able to understand all the vocabulary that appear during the video, but the gestures and the way of telling the story helps me a lot to understand it and it seems to me very funny.

I think it is very difficult to be able to tell a story in this way so funny without any images or visual supports.

I have been thinking about how can I use this method at the classroom and maybe it is useful for you to.

One activity that we can do with our children in class using this method could be to divide the class into groups of five.Each group has to choose one of the members of the group and make a short story among all the members of the group telling what he or she has been doing during the weekend. After that the group will have thirty minutes for creating their own story and accompany with gestures and a little dramatization. Then each group has to show their stories to the rest of the class and finally among each group have to choose which of the other groups of the class make it better.

I have found in internet other examples of storytelling that maybe are interesting for you.

You have also some web sites in wich you can see other important storyteller and information about them.

1. Mary Ellen HiIl
2. John Harris

And finally a very interesting video which speak about how to be a great storyteller.

The mystery of storyteller.

Could you tell me other ways to use this resource at the classroom?