I CAN TELL IT WORKSHOP

Hello bloggers!

Today I am very glad to share with you one of my best experiences during my degree. It happened thanks to the project called IcanTellIt designed by my teacher Raquel Fernández.

Have you ever imagine that new technologies, fairy tales and reading promotion could work together? With my bilingual teachers partners everything is possible!

We have enjoyed this activity with the students of 2^nd year Primary Children coming from Daoiz y Velarde State school. 

• PLOT OF THE PROJECT

A Boring Wizard has started to blow all the pages books and all the fairy tales characters have forgotten their identity. However, these magnificent students will help them to recover their memory and retell the story again.

This main objective will be achieved with the help of ICT and the different workshops created by all my partners, each one belongs to different popular fairy tales. Below you could find the description of my group proposal.

• MY GROUP POPULAR FAIRY TALE

When students arrived to our workshop they found a class very decorated: many flowers and birds, a big tree and the walls were re-covered by grass. Moreover, three characters were playing and dancing, trough this song they should guess who we were. Let’s see if you guess it!

So… Who are we? Very good the THREE LITTLE PIGS! After this song, we observed a big poster sticked in the tree that said wanted. The children also discovered that was the wolf paying attention to our descriptions. Then, the students should build the story with ICT before the wolf comes into the class. Subsequently, they were divided in groups of three and each one had a different house. Children should build their house with the correct material. Furthermore, with the help of additional characters: Mrs. Mouse, Mrs. Fairy and Mr. Lion, they should think about a good plan to scared the wolf. Finally, these students worked really hard and we all were save =)

• WORKING WITH ICT

As it is mentioned before, this project has been designed with the help of ICT. In our case, we have used a good and useful program called Edilim (click there if you want to see more information). We discovered it in the first course of our degree with our teacher Inmaculada Tello. It is a free tool that let you build multimedia books where you could combine different types of activities: matching, filling gaps, choosing the correct option, classifying pictures, working with texts... One of the main advantages that Edilim has is that could be used in any subject and in the language you choose! Moreover, it is possible to add pictures and voices notes. During the project we use it to help students:

1.          Recognize the three little pigs’ houses
2.          Identify the wolf role
3.          Build the story again

  

Students enjoyed a lot because they had an active attitude moving the pictures and thinking about the correct option.

Would you like to share with me how you use ICT in your workshop?

Finally, I would like to congratulate all my partners, they all do a great job and we could see how children enjoyed!

Thank you for reading my blog! See you in the next post! 

Best wishes:

READING STRATEGIES: MEANING, SOME EXAMPLES AND IMPORTANCE IN CLIL

Hello blogger explorers!

The other day in one of Raquel’s Fernandez lessons I realized how important is to design effective reading strategies. But… First of all, do you know what is a reading strategy? Here you have my own definition, I built it when Raquel asked us about it:

Reading strategies are educational tools that a person use to read and comprehend a text.

 As you could see, they have many connections in an educational context. The reasons are because they could…

·         Facilitate the reading comprehension of our students

·         Motivate them: previous, during and after the reading activity

·         Involve the students with a text in all senses

·          Be used by learners and teachers

After talking about the meaning of reading strategies and its definition we started analyzing them. Raquel divided us into groups of three people, each one should analyze a strategy. Later, we shared our descriptions and reflections about the different Method in a website called Padlet ( you could click on it in order to see all my partners work). Once I have read all the comments and videos I have selected the following ones: (Notice that my selection has been done taking into account the previous, during and after stages)

• BUILDING READING COMPREHENSION: this reading strategy should be done as a warm-up. The teacher takes an important role because he/she has to ask questions. They should make students reflect about characters, places or content that appear in the story. Moreover, students also play an important part because they have to produce and share their own deductions. This way, the teacher could assess which is his/her students’ previous knowledge in order to improve it.

• CRITICAL READING: this creative activity could be used during the reading process. However It must start before students read the first page. The reason is because they should state their hypothesis paying attention to the book cover. After this, students can change their opinions orally. While they are reading students should think about other questions and write them down in a small paper, such as a post-it. Moreover, they should classify them into different categories (why, what, when, where, who, how). It is important to mention, that this procedure will help the student to be able to answer the question by themselves.

• SUMMARY MAP: it is an example of an after reading activity. The aim is to create a summary map. To do so, the teacher should establish general questions that help them to achieve this objective, for example: who is the main character? Which are the main problems? Which are the solutions?. In addition, these questions should be answered in groups in order to develop their speaking skills and also to exchange their ideas. Once, they have done it, the summary could be easily done.

IMPORTANCE IN CLIL

As you could see these different reading methods could be applied in any subject, not only with literature. It is because their main goal is to help student to understand the meaning of a text. Moreover, as we all probably know CLIL deals with, among other things, communication and content. Sometimes, bilingual students feel that is difficult to understand the content because it is explained in L2. In this case, reading strategies could work as the language and content scaffolding they need. The reason is because they help students to synthesize the main information in order to make it more understandable. Furthermore, as it could be observed in the examples I have proposed, all these kind of activities start using LOTS, where students are applying, understanding and remembering; through teacher’s questions or activating previous knowledge. However, the process ends using HOTS because students could create, evaluate and analyze through their own exchanging opinions, assessing their hypothesis or building their own summary. This means, that with reading strategies we are also working on all cognitive skills which is also a big component in CLIL.

In my opinion, I think is important to be aware of how reading strategies could facilitate and improve the reading comprehension of our students. Also, I consider that as (future) teachers we should work with them in class in order to teach our students how easily they could be used.

Now, that you have read my post would you like to share with me: which are your perceptions between reading strategies and CLIL? 

See you in the next post! Best wishes