TRAVELLING IN CINDERELLA STORIES

Hello again!

Yesterday was a great day, our teacher Raquel created for us opportunity to work with children through our workshop about fairytales. We were divided into 6 groups and every group was supposed to work with one fairytale. There was Snowhite, Aladin, Hercules or our CinderellaJ The name of the project was I can tell it! And the aim was to teach kids to talk about fairytales. We spend quite a lot of time, but it was worth it – children like the fairytales and I believe they learnt a lot.

To make them feel like in fairytale we decorated our classroom like in story, with Cinderella´s couch with mice and pumpkin, we used posters to help them to understand new vocabulary, and we dressed ourselves as characters from Cinderella.

Then we prepared for them activity with books we made, very nice colourful books in which children were supposed to order pictures from the Cinderella story according the parts of story. We helped them to understand the story and the vocabulary also, trying to use poster we used, or just using body language.

After organizing whole story we discussed with them where was the difference between the original story they know and these stories we prepared – different versions of story about Cinderella. We tried to make it as simple as possible for children at this age /7-8 years/ so we changed just simple points in the stories like instead of pumpkin there was apple as a coach, we had 4 stepsisters or Cinderella lost trainer J Children were smart and many of them found these out easily. Then because of the name of the project I can tell it we decided to ask children to retell the story about Cinderella, and we the small help they told us a short version of CinderellaJ I am really glad to have the experience like this and I recommend to everybody to create workshop like this, because for children it was very interesting and funny and for us – future teachers it was very useful experience. 

Thank you Raquel once moreJ

See ya soon

Lenka

Trip with Flip - my 1st own poetry book!

Hello my dear friends:)

how are you? I would like to show you today something very special! I made my own poetry book! :) A week ago Raquel gave us assignment to work on own poetry book and to create our final book on the page Storybird.com, which is a perfect page for creating stories!

check it: www.storybird.com

There is sooo many of beautiful paintings and drawings for children stories. You just need to choose an illustrator for your book and have a good idea for a story!

From my childhood I like adventurous stories, with mystical circumstances, and also detective ones. So I decided for a story like this. I created a main character - very cute elephant, who is trying to get to a place he is dreaming about. He heard many of interesting comments about this place and about the circle he is interested in the most. So we will see in the book how he travelled.

We were also supposed to use different kinds of poems:

a list poem

a riddle poem

a letter poem

and haiku.

A list poem gets its name from the fact that most of the poem is made up of a long list of things. List poems usually have a list in the middle, plus a few lines at the beginning and a few lines at the end.Two famous list poems are “Bleezer´s Ice Cream" by Jack Prelutsky and “Sick" by Shel Silverstein.

Bleezer's Ice Cream

 by Jack Prelutsky

I am Ebenezer Bleezer,

I run BLEEZER'S ICE CREAM STORE,

there are flavors in my freezer

you have never seen before,

twenty-eight divine creations

too delicious to resist,

why not do yourself a favor,

try the flavors on my list:

COCOA MOCHA MACARONI

TAPIOCA SMOKED BALONEY

CHECKERBERRY CHEDDAR CHEW

CHICKEN CHERRY HONEYDEW

TUTTI-FRUTTI STEWED TOMATO

TUNA TACO BAKED POTATO

LOBSTER LITCHI LIMA BEAN

MOZZARELLA MANGOSTEEN

ALMOND HAM MERINGUE SALAMI

YAM ANCHOVY PRUNE PASTRAMI

SASSAFRAS SOUVLAKI HASH

SUKIYAKI SUCCOTASH

BUTTER BRICKLE PEPPER PICKLE

POMEGRANATE PUMPERNICKEL

PEACH PIMENTO PIZZA PLUM

PEANUT PUMPKIN BUBBLEGUM

BROCCOLI BANANA BLUSTER

CHOCOLATE CHOP SUEY CLUSTER

AVOCADO BRUSSELS SPROUT

PERIWINKLE SAUERKRAUT

COTTON CANDY CARROT CUSTARD

CAULIFLOWER COLA MUSTARD

ONION DUMPLING DOUBLE DIP

TURNIP TRUFFLE TRIPLE FLIP

GARLIC GUMBO GRAVY GUAVA

LENTIL LEMON LIVER LAVA

ORANGE OLIVE BAGEL BEET

WATERMELON WAFFLE WHEAT

I am Ebenezer Bleezer,

I run BLEEZER'S ICE CREAM STORE,

taste a flavor from my freezer,

you will surely ask for more.

Sick

 by Shel Silverstein

"I cannot go to school today,"

Said little Peggy Ann McKay.

"I have the measles and the mumps,

A gash, a rash and purple bumps.

My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,

I'm going blind in my right eye.

My tonsils are as big as rocks,

I've counted sixteen chicken pox

And there's one more--that's seventeen,

And don't you think my face looks green?

My leg is cut--my eyes are blue--

It might be instamatic flu.

I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,

I'm sure that my left leg is broke--

My hip hurts when I move my chin,

My belly button's caving in,

My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained,

My 'pendix pains each time it rains.

My nose is cold, my toes are numb.

I have a sliver in my thumb.

My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,

I hardly whisper when I speak.

My tongue is filling up my mouth,

I think my hair is falling out.

My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight,

My temperature is one-o-eight.

My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,

There is a hole inside my ear.

I have a hangnail, and my heart is--what?

What's that? What's that you say?

You say today is. . .Saturday?

G'bye, I'm going out to play!"

A riddle poem is a written poem that has a hidden subject or an agenda and a double meaning that one need to read and interpret. A riddle poem needs concentration and careful thinking when reading it, so as to get the hidden meaning properly.

I really like these ones:

I am a green ball that doesn’t bounce
After I’ve been popped from my green house.
I’m good to eat, but not with a fork;
I’d help teach the alphabet if I could talk.
What am I?

U can leave me your answer in a comment ;)

A letter poem is a poem in form of a letter. I enjoyed this letter poem, called LETTER TO MR.STOMACH:

Dear Mr. Stomach

I am writing to let you know you give me headache.

I have fed you in bulk,

But you never get full you are like 1 million water tank.

The ancestors craved and never satisfied theirs,

They went, still fighting for others,

Hoping more will fill you Mr Chunners,

In vein, it all came back to zeroes.

You are now disturbing me,

Hoping that I will comply to thee,

struggle and toil like a honey bee, 

For bread and butter for you sweetie. 

I am writing to let you know,

That you need to adhere to economic situations,

Mr. Money is on high demand 

So you need to cut the budget too.

I hope you will reply sooner,

As the time is quite shorter.

Or else you will be forced to get smaller 

In order to meet other financial endeavors.

And the last one was Haiku. Haiku is an unrhymed, syllabic form adapted from the Japanese: three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. Because it is so brief, a haiku is necessarily imagistic, concrete and pithy, juxtaposing two images in a very few words to create a single crystalline idea. I really like haiku´s, and on this webpage: http://www.poemhunter.com/poems/haiku/there is many of them I consider as very good, hope you will like it also J

And finally, this is my poetry book!

http://storybird.com/books/trip-with-flip/?token=67cbxzwnr9

This page is from time to time not working, so I decided to upload pages of my book also here:

I hope you guys like it and I am glad for any comment you leave me! ;)

See ya soon

Travelling in Libraries ;)

Hello guys!

What do you think about libraries? Do you consider them as good for children? Or in this period of time, when everything you can get easily on the internet, they are not that much necessary? /I will appreciate every comment you will leave ;) / I think that every child should experience library, to find out how many of amazing books he or she can find there and there is also calm space for her or him to read, just to take a book and enjoy reading.

Day before yesterday we were presenting the homework our teacher Raquel gave us. We were supposed to create a library in the classroom, with the lowest budget and with the highest creative ideas. I really appreciated other ideas of my classmates to create really nice place to read for children, but I think me and my group including Nuria, Martina, Alberto, Eduardo and Rebeca did a really good job, which I would like to familiarize you with now.

Firstly, we created a space, where students can borrow books and also to read. The easiest way, we consider, is in the one corner of the class. Every time in the class there is a free desk, nobody is sitting at, and it can easily function as shelf. To low our budget, we would use chairs of children, they can easily bring from the place they are sitting on them in the class.

To keep library organized, we created baskets, where we organize different kinds of book in. It will depend

what the students will bring, or what our sources will get, but there can be a basket of Fairytales, basket of Picture books or basket of Adventurous stories. We also created basket of Best books, where the students will have best book of the week, which they will choose weekly.

Of course it is necessary to not forget about sources. Firstly we recommend to ask parents, where they have any books available for library, and we will make them sure at the end of the year they will get them back. So parents and students can bring from their homes lot of books. This is the same with teacher or even more teachers, who are effort to bring some books. As other important source we consider some business companies, business people or everybody who is willing to add a book to library for kids.

Very important thing in our library is Library checkout. The function of this checkout is to keep evidence about the books students have borrowed. Every student will have a card, where teacher will write the name of the book she or he borrowed, the same with returning books back to library, it is very easy way to keep the books organized.

We have created also a box, to which the students will put the name of the book they recommend, so from time to time we can choose most favourite book to read in the class.

There is many activities guys, you can do in the library, but here is a list the best ones according me:

Reader of the week

This competition will take place every week. Children are supposed to read books through the week and in the end of the week there will be an evaluation, where the reader of the week will be awarded in the „wall of the fame“. We can easily check how many books each student has read according our Library Checkout.

Best reader

This competition will be evaluated in the end of the year, when we will find the best reader of the year and our winner will be awarded with the book.

We recommend to ask students to keep records about what they have read in exercise book called „Reader´s diary“, where she or he can write short summary from the book or draw a picture about the book, but what more important, what they liked about the book – what can easily remind them what was the book about and they can use it later in their studies.

Market of the books

Children will be divided into few groups, where every group will create a stall in the market with different kinds of books. I would recommend to do this activity at the beginning while creating the library. They can compete between each other, in the way, half of a class will be in the lesson people walking in the market, when second half of students will be people trying to „sell“ their books-trying to persuade people to buy from they stole, because they have such a great books! Other class they can change positions and after this, students will choose winners of the market.

Special week can be activity focused on the parents, who would come to see kids in the class and they would show them their library or even they can play small theatre in the class for them from the book they will choose. Other type of activity with this name can take place every week, students will have every week special topic from the books they will talk about. They can, for example, read fairytales, comics or books full of riddles and we can easily have many activities connected with these topics.  

Reading for friends

This activity will be different. Students will take their favourite book and will go to streets to read for people they meet in there – their new friends. They can read for people waiting at the bus stop, they can go to shops, to dentist and they will just simply ask “may I read a few lines from my favourite book?”. We tried this activity in Slovakia and kids really love it, they had lot of fun.

I hope guys, you have found some inspiration for your classes and you will be successful in working in projects about libraries ! ;)

See ya soon

Lenka