26th of July 2015

MADRID PRIMARY TEACHERS 2015

6th JULY, NORWICH

We started the morning with Hector´s reflexion about last Friday´s lesson, after that, Johanna, introduced us in the amazing web pages world, we surfed along different web pages.

·      http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/0/25119208

Here we can found lots of different activities classified from subjects and levels and also very useful videos.

·      http://www.makebeliefscomics.com

This is a very useful web page to show our students and encourage them to create their own comics, they can choose the number of panels, the characters, and many different features, so our pupils can work on the writing skill from their own level.

·      http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/

On this page we also find lots of activities on all the subjects, although it has lots of advertising.

·      http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resousces

May be this is one of the most easy to navigate, also full of very interesting activities.

·     http://www.senteacher.org/print/

For those students with special needs, here we have this page where we can find a lot of different material adapted to them.

It has also great printables: certificates, visual aids, and so on. You can use the ones they have or do your own ones.

·      http://www.topmarks.co.uk

Those who enjoy working with the interactive boards will enjoy surfering this page.

·      http://dvolver.com/moviemaker/make.html

Develop your creativity being a film director and make your own movie, you just have to choose the background, the characters and write your scrip. Let your students to create their own movies and improve their writing in a different way.

·      http://classtool.net

Here you will find different tools to encourage your students to practice English or you can use them to prepare your lesson, here you will find form a fakebook to timers, puzzles, jigsaws, etc.

·      http://www.resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/

If you want to work the cultural aspects and festivities, this is the right place, here you will find lots of materials to work on it and with a very nice and easy language.

After a break, we moved on to the drama lesson, we started with a CLAPPING GAME in its different versions: saying numbers, fruit and vegetables, animals, ..... a good activity to start, catch de attention or aour students and also to review some vocabulary.

Then we played a WORD TENNIS MATCH also saying all types of fruit, animals and so on, and practising in twos or also making to rows to play in two groups.

The third drama game we played was BODY NUMBERS, it consist on once the music stops everybody has to touch the floor with a certain number of parts of their body, we started playing in ones but after a couple of tries, we make it a bit difficult doing it in twos or threes.

The moment to become actors and actresses had come with the FREEZE FRAME in groups or four or five we had to do three moments of a fairy tale, frozen scenes, to be guessed by our mates. Once we did it, we were asked to re do one of the scenes and we were asked about how we felt o how the scene continued; at this point we worked on how we could use this activity to deal with bulling.

SCULPTOR AND STATUES was another game we played to practice job and occupations; in twos one was the sculptor and the other the statue, we had a great time guessing. We can also play a variation sculpting animals.

To teach adverts to our students we play an ADVERT GAME, writing down a list of adverts on the board the hole grope choose one while the “detective” is outside the classroom, then he/she has tod ask somebody to perform an action in the way the adverb say and he/she has to guess the adverb.

The last drama game was BRINGING A PICTURE TO LIFE after seeing and talking about a picture from a story or from an artist, will try to bring it to life and asking one by one we can explain who we are; a good moment to practice prepositions, and how the character we are fells in that moment

In the afternoon we had our lesson with Malgosia we were talking about how to teach vocabulary to children and the way the learn it. May be a good way to remind ourselves that children need time to learn new vocabulary.

The activity we did, was to learn 5 new words (colours)step by step:

·      - Listening carefully

·      - Sticking the coloured papers on the board and listening again and repeating.

·      - Coming to the front and pointing to de colour the teacher said.

·      - Numbering the colours and saying the colour and the number.

·      - Writing the number of the colour the teacher said.

·      - Yes/no game.

The teacher say a colour and a number and we had to say yes or no if it was true or false, we play it also with the eyes closed and sanding up and sitting down.

·      Repeat after the teacher, first in group, then in small groups and finally individual.

·      Playing secret number in order to guess the number and the colour, fist in big group and then in twos.

·      After all this oral working, we let the students to see the written form of the words and ask them to copy.

·      Finally we checked on the board playing with the colours and the words.

DEALING WITH BOOKS - 3rd July

After all the excitement from previous days, today we gathered at NILE again for some lessons on Reading skills development.

We started our first lesson with Jo in a different classroom from the one we were already used to. She had prepared some task for us to lead us into the topic: speaking about books.

 

The first, introductory task was intended to set us in the track of thinking about tiltles and authors, though every book had a pun on it. Following this track, the second task was a harder matching-type activity. In both cases, the hidden jokes got us into doing the task to fin out the punchlines. We did these task willingly knowing that our efforts would be rewarded with laughter.

We also had to write the titles and author of three books that somehow we could remember, either because we liked or disliked them, or perhaps because those were the first or the last books we read, or maybe because they were the most expensive books we bought or they were given to us and we had to read them as a predicament. By the way this was our thrid task. We had to do it in order to move on to the fourth task: talking about books.

On the fourth task we were given a tag with a basic question inquiring information from a book. We had to expand that tag question by adding two more questions around the information the tag question demanded. This was the final task and we had to stand up and walk around the class with the main aim of asking our partners. Standing up helped us to focus on the task of getting answers intsead of wandering ramdomly.

After the break Malgosia was waiting for us in our regular class with a wide selection of books for children. She even read to us some of her favourites during this and the following lesson after lunch. Though se didn't actually propose any book-related task, we were able to take into account several considerations on dealing with children's books.

First of all we noted the difference between real books for children and graded-readers books. Each have their own way on involving the kids into language learning. But for the moment we were going to focus on the first ones, in order to break down the asumption most kids have that to understand a text they must already know every single word on it intead of conveying the meaning from the context.

We should also consider the inclusion of ICT's in class while carrying out reading tasks. Computers and smartboards can help us to display the illustrations of children books at a larger scale and draw the attention of the kids towards the scene they depict. 

Before reading the book we could guide the kids on extracting information about the book from the cover or backside of the book as well as the initial pages. Information about the author or the plot of the story can be guessed in order to encourage them into reading.

While reading the book special attention should be payed on pronunciationand rhythm. We must ensure that the kids are all able to follow our reading and understanding the story. Higlighting the most repetitive arts of the story over a melody to help our audience retain it or simply singing those parts will contribute to associate certain words to movements taht have to do with their meaning. Analysing the illustrations of the book with the kids will help them to understand certain aspects of the plot or even the meaning of some words.

After reading we can also ask comprehensive question to check how well they're doing and get those distracted learners back to the task. Question may range from what has already happened or what would happen next, though this can also be done on the go as we are reading aloud. Questions can also target the grammar aspects of the text or aim towards the moral of the story.

To wrap up the topic of the day, some of us proposed new approaches to encourage kids into reading. Rafa suggested an example of his own with a book character named Flat Stanley. In this case pictures are made starring a cut out illustration of the main character on different landscapes. This way not only the character lives on the books but it also becaomes alive into the real world, sharing some experiences with the kids. Creating an emotional bond towards a fictional character it another way to trigger an interest into reading.

Above all, today was quite a relaxed day with lots of thinking to do. The majority of this strategies are ready to be used and do not demand a too much effort on the teacher's side. It was a nice day.

ENTRY 2nd July 2015 by Rocio Megia

TEACHER’S REFLECTION ON 2^ND JULY 2015

We started doing something related to the environmental print that we had seen in the previous session with Claudia so we looked at some signals on the whiteboard and we discussed in small groups how to work with that in our classes, such as giving directions, making role plays, creating stories, miming… We also assess some worksheets depending on the level we teach and we had a look at a video which revises one of the Science topics we usually deal with. This is a good activity as a listening and revision. We discussed in the groups that the activities were quite good but in real life we haven´t got enough time to develop such kind of tasks.

After the break we had a drama lesson with David Farmer, director and writer. He made a short introduction about himself and we started to make some games: drama freeze, scene theme or fruit salad as an example. These are good activities that we can easily put into practice to revise grammar or vocabulary as well as to integrate students with special needs or those who are shyer than others and also as an introduction to work on a further task as for example in the case of the scene theme we can start with this activity and create a story afterwards.

Finally with Malgosia we dealt with the way to encourage students to speak. The best way to do it is using puppets, finger puppets, masks, depressors with photos of our students... We also can revise grammar and vocabulary as well as create stories or poems. 

Photographs: coming soon!

SCHOOL VISITS- 1st of July, 2015

We had a very busy day. We visited two different schools during the morning and, in the afternoon, we were making a reflection on it. This is one of the most interesting activities we have in our courses in the U.K. It´s the best way to compare the two Educative Systems. Not only the children learn by doing, we do too.

What do we think is the same and different in the English schools and the Spanish schools?

 The same

- Children needs.

- Staff roles.

- Daily routines.

- Children social backgrounds.

A-Better in England

- Human and material resources.

In Bignold Primary School, with 400 pupils there are 75 adults working in the school!!!!

- Besides, we think they use the cooperative learning and teaching better than we do and all the staff is involved in

 the same project. It makes the achievement of the curricular

aims, easier.

- They have encouraging messages all around the school.

                

- As they have some assistants helping into the classrooms they can afford multitask work and "one to one" work with special needs children.

B-Better in Spain

- Our children learn a second language at school.

- We think that having physical contact with the children is good for them to learn and that expressing emotions helps could improve the relationship between teachers and pupils.

Points in B that we could implement

- The classroom arrangement if possible.

- Teachers coordination.

- Insert projects to work some of the topics.

- Encourage other teachers to use new technologies

29TH OF JUNE ENTRY

Sharing Norwich Knowledge

The first thing we did today in the morning was to put in common the different routes we followed yesterday's afternoon in and around Norwich city centre.

From all the groups we gather some useful information for the following days. Just some interesting points...

・ You cannot miss a walk along the riverside! Ask Rafa about what place you should sit and have a drink there.

・ Stroll over Elm Hill St., Princess St. and Tomland Alley. Get captivated by the past!

・ Discover Julian of Norwich sculpture by the main entrance to the Cathedral. She is holding her book “Revelations of Divine Love.” Enter in the Cathedral and just feel.

・ Have a look at the different stores in the Market.

・ Visit the castle. It is an art gallery and exhibition centre today, but it’s got lots of History inside.

・ Touch any flint stone. They are in all the black buildings you see!

・ Have a tea in any cafe and try a delicious cake!

・ And have lunch or dinner in a pub with a beer. (You can have more than one.)

REGARDING OUR STUDENTS...

We could do something similar with our students. Some teachers pointed out they could do it quite the same since they have safe open areas close to school. Other choice is to do it within the school involving teachers. A kind of gymkhana in the playground could be perfect too.

On regular basis students are given the language and the interaction is students-student or teacher-student in the same classroom. Therefore, the general point of this activity is to get students involved in their own communication, facing other English language speakers and communicating with them.

Something Else to Take from the City

The second work we did today was related to the “Environmental Print,” considering it not only the traffic signals but also all the language printed in our environments, such as food boxes, billboards, signals in street, shop windows' posters, etc.

We did this activity combining words and then we watched a video to check whether or not we were right in our guesses.

The interesting thing here is of course the activity itself. You can do it to introduce some language, to reinforce the vocabulary of a lesson or as an extension activity after. We got Jamie Keddie's site (www.lessonstream.org) to include in our lessons. Nevertheless, why not going out there and recording our own videos for our students? Kids will love it and, by appearing in there, we will definitely draw their attention. Let's try!

Setting Common Ground for Future Works

The rest of the morning and afternoon included, we worked on four different activities which we analysed after.

Activity	Materials	Grouping	Skills	Instructions	Cognitive Skills
BADGES	Post-it notes & markers	Changing pairs	L & S	Mingling activity: in your post-it you write your name. In its four corners, you draw something you like. Stand up, talk to a number of different people. Tell them what you think they like doing.	Symbolic thinking. Bloom's Taxonomy: up to application.
BIRTHDAY ORDER	-	Whole group. (Students should split in two groups to do it.)	Body Language & S.	Line up in order of your birthday. Just day and month. Do it without talking.	It demands abstract thinking which young learners don't have. Accuracy oriented activity. Bloom's Taxonomy: knowledge.
FOOD VENN DIAGRAM	Paper & Markers.	Groups of three.(Students should do in pairs.)	L & S	Make a Venn Diagram bout what you like to eat. In order to do so, you have to ask the others what do they like what they don't. Draw it down where it corresponds. On the board we can add some challenging vocabulary. Then, we said aloud what happened in each diagram, for example “None of us liked offal (casquería),” or “Neither me nor Maria José like seafood but Marga does.”	Bloom's Taxonomy: up to evaluation.
SINK OR FLOAT	A mini-white board, a container with water, fruit & vegetables.	Small group.	Mainly L & S. But also a little bit of R & W	In your groups talk and guess whether the fruit will sink or float. Note your predictions down in your whiteboards.	Referring to already passed experiences. Children guess, predict using the given structure.
CRAZY DAY SONG	Song sang by the Teacher.	Individually.	L & S	Listen to a song. Write down the things you hear.	Bloom's Taxonomy: Evaluation. Language is based on concrete situations: achievable for children.
AUCTION	List of sentences with grammar/ spelling/ punctuation mistakes.	Whole group.	R	You have got 100 pounds to spend. In a real auction we have a catalogue. We don't, but we have a list of sentences. Sometimes you buy not a real masterpiece but a fake. It may happen that some of the sentences are also fake. Have a look at them and decide which ones you like and which you don't.	Bloom's Taxonomy: Evaluation. Language is abstract: beyond their level of thinking. It demands teacher scaffolding. By doing this kind of activities we are wrapping a boring activity in a nice paper.

All the activities we have done today in class are useful and offer us many different possibilities. We can adapt them to our students at different levels considering what we have been remembering about Piaget and Bloom's theories. It is also interesting to point out that, even though we are working these activities from the English SL/FL perspective, all can be also used in content classes, bringing up together language and content (CLIL) as we usually do in the Bilingual Programme.