STORYTELLING

Hello everyone!

I am going to tell you a story…

Once upon a time there was a class full of bilingual students that studied to be the best teachers.

One day Raquel (their teacher) told them a story, The Princess and the Dragon. This story was very funny and she illustrated it with a power point and GESTURES!! Then Raquel said: “You have to make a similar story” and the students very surprised started to think about how they could create a story similar to Raquel’s.

Suddenly Patri, Inma, Dani and Jessy started to think about the new story. “How can we connect it with the curriculum?” asked Dani. “Don’t worry” replied Jessy, “I have an idea and we are very imaginative”. So they started to think. They thought and thought and thought and finally they created a new story.

Patri, Inma, Dani and Jessy told the story to all the class and they were going to remember it ever after.

This is an example of a story.  I want to prove that creating a story is very easy and we can create it with any topic. As Raquel taught us, everything that we tell is a story, it can be written or not.

This story explains what we did in class the other day, we have created a story with the structure explained in the Literature class of a typical tale (you can see the structure in blue colour in the story) and it is called The Rabbits and the Fox. It is about a grey rabbit that meets a cute rabbit in the countryside, then a horrible fox appears and the rabbits run to the den. We have created a power point and some gestures to illustrate the story. Clicking on this link you can see the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YP82LWKeAU

And the slides that we have created related to it:

Another way to represent the story is with a role-play, where we can decorate the class like in a story. In class we represented We’re going to the bear hunt by Michel Rosen, we did not use any material, the class was divided in groups and then a group represented all the elements (grass, river…).

From my point of view these activities are easy to do in schools with the children of any level, since Infant Education to the last level of Primary Education. They are funny, dynamic, interesting and purposeful. We can add some elements of other subjects like Science, Music or Arts and Crafts. For example, our activity was related with Science and the food chain, the rabbits eat carrot and the fox want to eat the rabbits, and the animals have different adjectives, so they learn new vocabulary.

What do you think?

Eric Carle and his stories.

The other day in class we investigated different authors. The author that we have investigated was Eric Carle. He was born in 1929 in Syracuse, New York. Eric Carle design, illustrate and write children’s books since 1969. At the moment, he has written more than 70 books and has sold more than 125 million copies over the world. He has a museum in Massachusetts, where are the originals drawings of his books, it has a part to drawing and we can read all his books. His most famous books are:

            The Very Hungry Caterpillar, where we can see the butterfly life cycle (egg stage, caterpillar stage, pupa stage and butterfly stage). The story is based principally in the caterpillar stage, when it eats one apple, two pears, three plums, four strawberries, five oranges, one piece of chocolate cake, one ice cream cone, one pickle, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, one slice of watermelon and one green leaf in a week. Finally it passes to the pupa stage and then emerging like a butterfly.

 

                The Grouchy Ladybug is a book that helps the kids to learn the hours and other contents. It is about a ladybug that is looking for a fight with someone big enough, it meets someone different in different hours. At the end, the ladybug gets its comeuppance and begins to be more sympathetic. The story has a parallel structure where the ladybug repeats the same question and the answer of the animals is the same too.

 

                Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see? is a good book to work the colours and different animals. It has a repetitive structure, it repeats the colour of the animal, the animal and what do you see? along the entire story. This book has two variables what are called Polar Bear, Polar Bear, what do you hear? and Panda Bear, Panda Bear, what do you see?; the first one related with the zoo animals and sounds, and the other one related to endangered species.

 

                I think that these books can be used at school to teach different contents like colours, structures and days of the week, they can be related to other subject, not only to English. I add the link to the Eric Carle blog and official page.

http://ericcarleblog.blogspot.com.es/

http://www.eric-carle.com/home.html