CREATING STORIES

THE THREE RECYCLING BINS!

Hello my blogger friends!

I am sure that sometimes you have thought that it is very difficult to find a story that fits with the topic you want to talk about. Nonetheless, have you ever tried to create your own one?

• MODEL

Dominic Streames suggested a good practical way to do it. He explained this model in a Tesol- Spain conference in Bilbao 2012. He proposed a narrative structure that must be follow in all the stories created. Moreover, he explained that is important that the teacher always uses the same gestures. In this way, students will have more facilities to understand the content of the tale. According to the expert Dominic Streames it is not enough because students also need visual scaffolding. Due to this fact is also necessary to create several pictures that help the student to follow the story.

Here you have a clear example of creating a tale following Dominic Streames model. It is called The Big tree and the Three Recycling Bins. If you pay special attention to the sequence and structure of the tale you will notice that it is easy to change. 

• APPLICATION IN A BILINGUAL CONTEXT

As we already know, if we want to attract children’s attention we must propose a motivating activity, such as a storytelling. According to the curriculum Royal Decree 1513/2006 from 7^th December the students of the First Cycle of Primary Education start to work about recycling, therefore the story could be used to introduce the topic and activate students’ previous knowledge.. 

Through this story students will...

 ü  …Recognize how recycling bins are

“We are three, we recycle and we are hungry”

Physical appearance looking at the story pictures

 ü  …Identify their function

“We will eat Mr. Rubbish (…)

 So the Three Recycling Bins opened their lids and ate Mr. Rubbish. 

They ate, and ate, and ate and finally the Three Recycling Bins won Mr. Rubbish”

Paying attention to the pictures, they will see that each bin take a different type of material

 ü  …See that recycling helps us to keep clean our cities

“Oh no!” said the big and strong tree/

Don’t worry” said the Three Recycling Bins we will eat Mr. Rubbish”

 ü  …Recognize that they should not dirty their cities 

“I am Mr. Rubbish and I will destroy your park”

Moreover, we should not forget that with this story we are not only working  science contents because we are also helping to produce language! Storytelling provides contexts for talking, listening, reading and writing. 

As you could see there are plenty of advantages that encourages us to create our own tales. That is why I recommend all the teachers to use them in class. Not only the student will acquire new curricular and language contents, the teacher will also learn how to adjust the content and the language according to their students’ needs!