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?