How can we choose the books for our futures students?

Hello everybody. Today my post is about how we can choose books for our future students. This is an important decision because to acquire a taste for reading it is necessary to read about what we really like and we, as teachers, should encourage our students to read, for the pleasure of reading.

I am going to explain you some criteria that we can use in order to choose the adequate book.

1^st Criterion: Age of the student.

We have to take into account the evolutionary stage in which the children are.

Depending on their age, kids like different topics, for example, they normally like stories where the main character is a child like themselves between five and seven years old, and with extraordinary events like superheroes or wizards.

2^nd Criterion: The length of the book.

This criterion is linked to the first one, because depending on the age and the ability to read of the child, he/she can read longer books.  We should keep in mind that the children have to be able to follow the story without missing the reading.

3^rd Criterion: The language.

The language has to be adequate for the students’ knowledge; the books can have words that they do not know, but not so complicated. The verbal structures should be known by the children, the book cannot have new structures because the children will not understand them. It is important to know that the presence of repeated structures, onomatopoeias and parallels structures catch the attention of kids because they can guess what  the next sentence is going to be and this makes kids feel secure. For example, in Snow White story they can guess what the Stepmother is going to say when she looks at herself in the mirror (“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the loveliest lady in the land?”).

4^th Criterion: The structure.

The book has to have a lineal structure: presentation of the characters, the crux where the problems occur and an ending where the problem is solved. For example in the Three little pigs we can differentiate the three parts, first one presentation of the three pigs, the second one where they make their houses and the wolf destroys two of them and the last one where they can survive thanks to the brick house.

5^th Criterion: The topic.

It is important to know what children like. Depending on their interests we can catch their attention with different stories. We can find some books where the main character has some relation to the kids, thus we catch their attention.

I think that we have to bear in mind these five criteria to select the books for our future students, not only in English, we can use them in Spanish too. The most important thing is to read the book before the children do, because you have to know the characteristics of it, not only the students’ characteristics.

CLASSROOM LIBRARY PROJECT

These last weeks we have prepared a Project related to a library in the school, the idea was to create a library and present it to the school to be passed.

Our project was created thinking in a bilingual public school for first cycle of Primary Education students. The library project is related to English subject but the materials are going to be prepared in Arts & Crafts.

The project is called the Magic trip. We call it this way because it is related to a bus. The project is decorated with a bus stop and a bus.

We are going to create a big bus with continuous paper, each window will have a photograph of a child and a bus ticket (reading report), children will place a sticker on their window when they finish their book. Depending on their opinions the sticker will be green or red; green if they liked the book, red if they didn’t like it. The teacher will give a personalized diploma to the child when s/he gets 10 stickers.

The driver is going to be one child per week, s/he is going to give and to collect their classmates’ books, they have to supervise the notebook of control, where the name of the book that the children have is written.

The bus ticket contains reading reports where the kids have to complete:

Driver (author):

Destination (book’s name):

Line (collection):

What I liked less is…

What I liked the most is…

Drawing:

The shelves are going to be decorated like a bus stop.

To link the bus and the shelves we are going to create a road where the children are going to write the words that they did not understand. There is going to be a card with the name of all the books where the students have to write one word related to the book, it cannot be repeated. At the end of the year the teacher is going to select two different books and in groups the students will create a story.

SPACE:

The library is situated at the back corner of the class and the posters at the back next to it.

MATERIALS:

-Shelves.

-Colours cards.

-Cardboard.

-Continuous paper.

- Water colours.

-60 books.

-Notebook of control.

      

          BOOKS:

       Each child has to bring at least one English book to the library; these books have to be approved by the teacher. In addition, the school is going to provide with some extra books from the Usborne collection, first reading levels one and two. For example:

1. The Wish Fish.
2. The Lion and The Mouse.
3. On The Moon.

BUDGET:

The shelves are part of the class equipment. Some of the materials needed to decorate and create the resources are proportionate by the school and the others are bought with the cooperative money of the class.

The books bought by the school are cheap, they cost around 2.50€ per book. The total cost of the books is about 50 €.

What are the steps to pass a project in a school?

1.       Meeting with your cycle colleagues where the project must be passed.

2.       The management team has to pass the project too.

3.       The project is included in the school “Planificación general anual”, this document is passed and the project can start to be prepared.

If the project comes up at mid-year, it is going to be passed by the “Comisión de Coordinación Pedagógica”.

I think that this project is very motivating to children, where they have to participate in all the tasks. The main aim is that the children read along in English or Spanish.

Fairy tales

In the last weeks we have talked about fairy tales. During the classes Raquel saw as different ways to work with the tales and how different can be the versions depending on the authors and their personal characteristics (religion, hobbies…).

In class we analyse the Cinderella’s tale by two different authors: Grimms and Perrault, but we know to the Disney’s version. The main differences between these stories are based in the life of the authors. For example in Grimms’ story there are a lot of religious sense related with Cinderella’s mother, in other way Perrault version has many aesthetic factors like many details of clothes. The main differences between the two versions are these ones:

Grimm	Perrault
-Aschenputtel. -There are three dances. -Mother grave. -Condemn to the stepsisters. -Gold slippers. -Not hour. -Aschenputtel’s stepmother cut the feet of Aschenputtel’s stepsisters.	-Cinderella. -There are two balls. -Godmother. -Forgive stepsisters. -Glass slippers. -Midnight. -The shoes don’t fit the stepsisters.

 

But these differences appear in other fairy tales too such as Little Red Riding Hood that we studied the last year in Spanish Literature, where in Perrault’s version Little Red Riding Hood goes to bed with the wolf, it is a metaphor what means that the young women have to be careful with the men. The differences between them are:

Grimm	Perrault
- The mother advises to her to go through the wood and do not stop.	-The mother only says to go to her grandmother house to bring her a cake and butter.
-Little Red Riding Hood does not find the path.	-Little Red Riding Hood meets the wolf, near the path.
-The wolf asks some questions about her grandmother to Little Red Riding Hood.	-The wolf says that it is going to go to see her grandmother too, and they can see who will be the first go roundabout the wood, the wolf goes through the path.
-Little Red Riding Hood does not come get into the bed with the wolf.	-The wolf says to Little Red Riding Hood to come get into the bed.
-The hunter discovers the wolf and kills it. He opens the wolf stomach and save Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother.	-Little Red Riding Hood is not saved.

Here I add the links to the two different versions of Little Red Riding Hood.

Grimms’ version:

http://www.yankeeweb.com/library/storytime/grimmbros/grimmbros_47.html

Perrault’s version:

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0333.html#perrault

HOW CAN WE WORK FAIRY TALES IN CLASS?

Raquel has taught to us different ways to work with the stories. In my last post I have written about role-play but these weeks we have learnt other types to work with.

The frozen frames are very funny. It is consisted to represent a scene of a tale but the people, who represented it, must to be frozen, they cannot move. We can do the same that in class and try to guess it or to work with different scenes of a tale and represent it. A variant to frozen frames is to act when somebody says. This activity can be use in science class too, representing the different topics like planets or senses. On this way we work with communication between the participants in the activity and they can improvise various materials to make the activity more real. 

Other way to work with is to tell the story as if they were characters of a tale, taken to account the different feelings and perspectives. They work their empathy and language.

As you have read we can work the stories in many different ways, and we have to select what is the adequate to the age and language of the students.