What did you do?

It was a day of presentations, the first one was about "writing in English" and it was made by Elena and Carmen. The second presentation was about "children loving stories" and was made by Sara and Susana.

What did you learn?

During the first presentation we learned activities, tips and didactics on how to teach writing in English to use it in our near future as teachers.

For instance, in pre-primary we learned that the children can trace letters in the air or in the back of some classmates and, we discovered that if we put painting in a bag and with the help of a cotton swab, they can trace letters there as well.

For the first years of primary education, to encourage children to write in English, we can put letters in bottle caps, so that they can create words. We can also make a block game. We can divide the blocks into three colors, and each color with a part of a sentence. For instance, blue for subjects, purple for verbs and orange for phrases complements.

For students of the last elementary years or students with a high level of English, we can perform an activity called "making a story book". It consists of writing a story among several students, which results in a funny or crazy story.

We can also carry out an activity in which, for example, if we are talking about painters. We give a picture to each of the students, the students have to write the description of the picture, then one of the students has to describe his painting aloud while his classmates draw what they hear until they can guess which painting it is.

About the second presentation called “Children loving stories”, we could learn that when we are working in class with stories, the first time we have to read it completely and the second time we can read it asking questions to the students. But, we can do other kind of activities with stories. For instance, we can give them a story in pieces and the students in small groups have to join it.

What is your opinion?

I think the presentations my colleagues are making are very good. They are offering us very interesting didactic proposals, with which we will increase the motivation of our students and they will learn in an active and fun way.