This is being a short week too, because there was no school on Monday. Christmas is approaching, and there is a different atmosphere, even if we haven’t started making Christmas decorations and things like that yet.
This week the LH1 and LH2 groups have been doing extra things, because they finished their units last week. The teacher told the LH1 group a story about a little pig, and we have done a booklet of the story and a pig’s mask during the week. The story itself was quite poor, as a story, in my opinion; just a “sugar coating” to review some vocabulary. It was about a little pig who cried on its way home because it didn’t know where its mummy was. It gets in the house and asks “mummy, where are you?”. The mummy answers that in the living room, watching tv. Then, the little pig asks again, and the mummy says that in the kitchen, getting supper ready. Then it is the mummy who asks where the little pig is, who says that in the bathroom, taking a bath. Then the mummy asks again, and the little pig answers that it is in the bedroom, reading. And the last time the mummy asks the little pig doesn’t answer because it is asleep, so the mummy says good night. Even if the story was so bad, children quite enjoyed it, so maybe it was only bad to my eyes. Well, some of them complained when the teacher told the story again today, for the third time, this time with their help.
The LH2 group watched a video on Tuesday, and we will see what we will do today.
Well, I will do as I said last week, and write on the ideas for the practical part of my undergraduate dissertation. I have come to the conclusion that it won’t be possible to propose something out of the blue which will interfere with the lesson planning that has already been set, so I need to think on something that I can use and will be done within the normal lessons. I thought that I would like to know what kind of way to tell the story would engage students the most, assuming that some ways would be more appealing to them than others. So far, I have seen teachers tell stories in different ways in LH: dramatising small parts of the story together with a small group of students, playing a CD with a native speaker reading the story, having students read the story taking turns and using large images with a text stuck in the back from where the teacher can partly read. In HH, we have told the story in different ways too: with the teacher dramatising all roles and students repeating the dialogue of each character, using a poster with stickers for the characters that each student would move as the story unfolded and using a booklet with the story as the guide to tell the story.
My teacher has told me that when they start a new unit, the story is always told with no visual support first, dramatising it together with the whole group. The next times when the story is told they begin to introduce some visual material.
I talked to my school tutor about the practical part of the dissertation I am supposed to do, and we concluded that maybe I could do some research on the reasons behind the ways the story is told in this particular methodology, together with the goals pursued, and analyse if we fulfill those goals in our class. It doesn’t sound absolutely thrilling, but it is feasible. So, I will do some literature research on the Artigal and Eleanitz methods regarding the theoretical background behind the way in which stories are told. I have almost finished reading the teacher’s guide for Artigal, and there isn’t that much I can get out of it, so I will try to find specific articles on the subject.
If I manage to get relevant information, I will concentrate on that and start gathering data when we start working on the new units after Christmas. I might leave out the LH4 group, and attend the lessons of more than one group in the LH1, LH2, HH4 and HH5 grades, so I can watch how the teacher tells the story to one group, and do it myself with another group.
Next week I would like to return to more general aspects, and talk a bit on my expectations before I started the school placement regarding the LH stage, and what reality has taught me. In summary, I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy the LH lessons much, because I thought I liked younger children better for teaching, but it turns out I am really enjoying the LH classes, especially LH4. All grades are very different, but there are reasons to enjoy the experience in all of them, I have found.
iruzkinik ez:
Argitaratu iruzkina