Tuesday, 7th JULY (Storytelling, classroom management and spelling)

Today we celebrated San Fermín Day at Nile with three interesting lessons about storytelling, classroom management and spelling.

The storytelling lesson with Malgosia dealt with some ways of teaching literacy using oral skills and visual aids. The main aim of the following activities is to train children (in the sense of guiding them) in order to help them understand the global message even though they do not get every single word.

We started with a story about a frog family that lived next to a pond. One by one they jumped and sat on a water lily. Malgosia put into practice some techniques to make it attractive and interactive. As a pre-listening activity she stuck each family member on the board without saying who was dad, mum, etc. At the same time she was telling the story, she encouraged us to participate repeating the same structures for each frog. After the story, as examples of post - listening activities, children could add more relatives, bring photos of their own families, use different animals, change the actions or act the story out.

Afterwards, we learnt the importance of everyone in the group working together with the story of "The rainbow fish", written by Marcus Pfisfer. First, Malgosia told us a tale about a small red fish and a big blue fish, repeating the same structures and using simple language. We finished with a song (sh sound - phonetics).

Then, we made our own fish and described it. This pre-listening activity fosters creativity and critical thinking. So, with our fish, seated in a circle, we created a school of fish, where the shiny one (maybe the naughtiest child) refused to share one of his scales with the others. ("Could you give me one of your shiny scales?" "No way, go away"). This activity could hep us to discover the different roles in our group,  what is going on in the classroom or to develop empathy in children.

Finally we told the story of "Mr. Wiggle and Mr. Waggle". If you write the tittle in google bar you will find many entries related to it ;-) It is a very simple story, performed just with our fingers. It reinforces prepositions, phonetics, verbs, tenses, grammar structures... And it takes 2 mins!!


The next lesson was about classroom management and discipline. We learnt that we do not need to shout children (it is not good for us either). We must consider that bad behaviour sometimes hides serious problems (mental disease, family problems...).  Besides, Malgosia presented two principles: MostImportantTwentySeconds (what to do at the beginning of the class?) and the 3 BEFORE ME (before asking the teacher, check with yourself, check the board and check with a friend). Moreover, she talked about two approaches regarding teacher management:

• THE POWER APPROACH: for example, if one student does not stop talking, or he/she is not working, we can stand behind him/her and wait until he/she stops, or choose a point in the classroom called the discipline point to step into it if they do not pay attention to us.
• THE ALTERNATIVE APPROACH: for example, using our hand, as a phantom hand, and standing behind the student, press his/her shoulder for a sec.

In the afternoon, we had a class with Johanna. She told us about the several origins of English words and their influence in spelling and pronunciation.
Moreover, she provided several techniques for teaching English writing. This aspect is usually hard for our pupils. I liked the idea of using coloured blocks to create a visual pattern of the word and the oral game about relating sounds and vowels.