Drama Queen

Hello my dear Bilinguals!

Today’s entry is very special and will give many meaningful activities to work with children, not only they will work on English but also in many intrapersonal and interpersonal skills. I am talking about drama.

For this purpose, I am going to describe some of the different activities that we have been doing during our today’s class with scaffolding methods and additional resources. I will focus on simple activities to prepare the students and some others related to comprehension.

1.     Warm up!

Working with drama and kinaesthetic skills is a great opportunity for children to develop their self-esteem by expressing feelings or show their hidden skills. Nevertheless, there are many children that can be afraid of acting or simply talking in front of their peers. For this reason, if we as teachers want to work this aspect, we have to be very carefully and organise the lesson following a progression. That is what our teacher has done with us.

The first activity consists of having all the students walking through an open area (the school gym or the playground would be great). The aim for students is walking while they pretend to do an action or to be someone else. When the teacher says FREEZE, everyone must stop and explain what is he doing or who is he/she.

How applause makes you feel? Encourage the students to go up into a stage or something upper than the floor for introducing themselves and say something, whatever they want. Then, their peers will give him/her a big applause.

2.     Comprehension

The body is powerful tool that can help students to understand better a concept. This is true if we take into account that there are many children whose highest intelligence is the one called Kinaesthetic Intelligence. There are many simple activities that work on comprehension of concepts or even stories. Let me show you some of them.

Ask for four volunteers. Two of them would be sitting in a chair (students A) and the other two would be behind them, only showing their arms behind the shoulders of the two first. (Students B).

 It sound tricky but is that simple as this picture shows:

Then pretend as the rest of the classmates were the audience of a TV show, and the two volunteers that are sitting down were two popular celebrities. At this point, the aim is to simulate and interview between the audience and the TV Stars.

The role of the students B is to express with their own arms what the student A is answering without seeing his face or knowing his answers.

* Scaffolding point: There are many possibilities to this activity for working children comprehension. For instance, leaving the interview setting, the students can have prepared the questions for the celebs beforehand and the celebs can have prepared their role and their story. It is a good opportunity to work with types of questions, how to make it and how to answer it, and oral speeches.

Ask for some volunteers and you as the teacher have to give them a story and a situation. After that, the volunteers go in front the rest of the class and represent that final situation. The only rule for them is not to talk, they only can make gestures. The rest of the students must guess what had happened and how the characters have come to that end by asking questions. 

*Scaffolding point: to support the comprehension, the characters can show different real pictures or elements according to the story to help the students finding the story. In addition, the teachers can give the students some starting situation and from that situation, students must guess the end. For the language scaffolding, there can be little posters on the class’ wall that help the students to remember how to make question, for instance.

Time to put it all in a nutshell

As you can see, there are many different ways to work with drama, improvisation and movement and it can helpful if we want to improve skills such as comprehension of stories or situations. Furthermore, it may be a tool for children’s socialization as communication among them is promoted.

What do you think about working with drama in a CLIL classroom? Can you think about more benefits for students? Can you find any negative point?

Keep tuned for more didactic resources!

And Merry Christmas my little bilinguals!

Alice in Wonderland WORKSHOP

Hello my dear Bloggers!

Today I wan to share with you an Amazing activity that took place at the Centro Universitario Cardenal Cisneros, the place where I am preparing my training to become a teacher.

I Can Tell It! Project

This big activity was composed by six Workshops. In each workshop there were almost 8 of us (the students) and 8-9 real children…REAL ONES! It is the first time that we work with children at the University and it was great. Everyone was very exiting about this project and for this reason the Centro created a hastag on Twitter (#cuccicantellit), so if you want to see some photos and discover our feelings about this project, I strongly recommend you to go to Twitter and look for the hastag.

Our aim in this project was to help the children retell popular fairy tales using ICT. My group and I chose Alice in Wonderland.

Welcome to Wonderland

The workshop that we prepared was structure as follows:

Warm-up

My partner Ana, dressed as she were Alice, is asleep and she just wake up. She told the children that she has have a very strange dream but she could not remember it and ask for help to children to find out what was her dream about.

The White Rabbit

Immediately, children meet Marina, dressed as she were the White Rabbit. From this moment to the end of the workshop, the white rabbit will be guiding the children into de mysterious world of Wonderland.

The White Rabbit starts telling the beginning of the tale to the children and she will stop when Alice fell through a hole. At that moment the White Rabbit will ask the children to look for help to follow the story.

Door, Key, Bottle…

In this moment, children meet me and the first activity begins.

We all sit down in a semicircle and I start telling them the next part of the tale, how Alice enters into Wonderland. Can you remember that part of the tale?

While I am telling the story, I show them some pictures taken from the Disney film “Alice in Wonderland”.

When I finish that part of the story, I leave the images on the floor and I begin to show one of these flashcards you can see below.

The activity consist on matching that image with the name of the object or the action that appears in the image.

With this activity, we are contextualising the story by showing them pictures and we are promoting the association of a word with its meaning through the context of the story itself.

Merry Merry Unbirthday

The White Rabbit grab the attention of the children again and takes the children to another scene of the tale, the Tea Party.

My partners Javier and Miguel, dressed as they were the Mad Hatter and March Hare, invite the children to their particular “Unbirthday Party”. The activity consists of the famous Chair Game. The known Unbirthday song is playing while the children sing it. At the same time they have to turn around a group of chairs singing and dancing. When the music stops, the have to take one chair and sit on it.

The aim of this activity has to do with the kinaesthetic intelligence. It is a dynamic activity where children can run and have fun while there are improving some phonemes and pronunciation while they are listening and singing a song.

Red Roses Race

The person in charge of this activity is Maria, and she is pretending to be the evil Queen of Hearts. Now, children are divided in two groups and they must form a line. In front of them there are two rosebushes with white roses on them.

Children have to run towards the rosebushes one by one, draw a red cross on a rose and take a little piece of paper that is behind the rose.

When the two teams finish crossing white roses, they will have on their tables a sentence from the evil queen. Children will have to order the sentence and read it in loud voice if they do not want to lose their heads.

Who's been painting my roses red? 

WHO'S BEEN PAINTING MY ROSES RED?

Who dares to taint,

With vulgar paint,

The royal flower bed?

For painting my roses red

Someone will lose his head.

Alice remembers

Children now know some of the adventures that Alice has lived in her dream. So children come back to Alice and they will try to order some photos that she has about her dream.

Finally, Alice will be relieved to remember all this episodes of her dreams thanks to the children.

Here you have some pics of the great time we had doing this project:

Finally the result was good. However, it is true that things do not usually go as you imagine, there are a lot of factor to take into account when working with children. Welcome to Magisterio I guess.

How were your workshops? What do you think about our activities? How can we improve them?