Create a STORY from a PICTURE!

The use of pictures in literature is a way of stimulating children, is a tool that helps children to create fantasy. Our goal as teachers is to make children discover the pleasure of reading, which gives them the opportunity of swimming into different worlds. But to love reading, they have to discover this by themselves. 

We can use picture in a lot of different activities.Today I would like to share with you an activity that I did in Slovakia last year. With this task, the teacher tried to show us how we can motivate students to create and write new stories with the help of a picture. 

The teacher put a few pictures on the table and we had to pick one with which we felt familiarized. Then he asked us the next questions: “What can you see in the picture? What do you think is happening in this exact moment?” He gave us around 5 minutes to write down as much ideas as we could. Then he asked: “What do you think has happened before this moment?” He gave us another 5 minutes to complete this task. Finally he asked: “What do you think will happen?” When the last 5 minutes were over he explained us what the activity was about.  First he wanted us to be focus on the picture, on what we can observe and imagine what is happening in the present time. But, in order to be able to create a story, we have to create an introduction (“What has happened?”) and the conclusion (“What will happen?”)

 

What has happened?	What is happening now?	What will happen?

 

As a final activity, children will fusion the three blocks and develop their own story.  They will read, showing the picture, their own story to the rest of the class. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS ACTIVITY?

Here is the picture that I chose and the final result of my story. I hope you will enjoy it.  

 

I woke up and realized that it has been so long without seeing my friends from school. It is amazing how fast the time runs. It looks like it was yesterday when we were playing with the fallen leaves in the schoolyard. I missed that feeling of freedom. “I have to do something”, I said to myself.  I prepared a long sweet coffee. The only smell of the coffee made my senses wake up. Definitely, I had the feeling that that day was going to be unforgettable. 

Only a few friends were in town that Saturday. Sally, Peter, and Stephaney were my best friends when we were ten. We used to do the craziest things in school and the teachers always got mad with us.  We were laughing and talking about how our life was when we were in school and how it is nowadays. 

“What a marvelous sunny day for walking.  It was great that you called us, Betty”, Sally said. 

We were walking through a huge, full of green and yellow trees forest. It is autumn.  The light of the sun companied us during the trip. Suddenly, Peter started running. We didn’t know where he was going but we run after him. Then, we understood everything. There was an enormous land full of brown leaves on the floor. We started pushing one to each other, and Stephaney fell in the floor. We took a lot of leaves and started covering her. Only the sound of our laughs interrupted the silence of nature. A few birds flied away from a tree close to us. We were on the floor. Sally run to take her camera. “This is a great moment to remember”, she said. As he used to do when we were in school, Peter put his weird, funny face for the picture. 

Not really far away a strong thunder sounded. We looked to the sky when the first water drop fell on Stephanie’s nose. The sky was completely full of black clouds. We picked our things quickly, but the storm was faster than us and it started raining so hard. We were in the middle of the forest, completely wet but happy. Instead of running, we started laughing and enjoying that moment of freedom. It felt like in schoolyard. 

I am now lying in my bed with a cup of hot chocolate around my hands. I smile to myself and start thinking about this marvelous day.  “I knew today was going to be a perfect day for recovering childhood”. With this last though, I got asleep.

 

NURSERY RHYMES

London Bridge

(Noelia Barroso, Guiomar Caballero, Clara Vilches, Sandra Anaya, Sara Blanco, Leticia de la Serna)

Last Wednesday we had our first practical lesson of “Exploring Children’s Literature in English”.  We were exhausted after a morning full of classes, but suddenly everything changed… We were victims of a magic spell and, suddenly, we moved backwards to our early childhood and a marvelous feeling involved us. The magic spell was made by warming-up bounding with familiar thoughts and a little of new knowledge, in order to be able to adapt, create and produce the final spell, NURSERY RHYMES.

One of the most important reasons why we moved backwards so easily was that Raquel motivated us to be active and participative, and she made the topic close to us. First, she told us to think if we knew what “Nursery Rhymes” were, and if we could remember any from our childhood. Little by little, we went deeper into the proposed topic, listening typical nursery rhymes and doing different activities and exercises about it. In the last part of the lesson, we learnt different techniques to work with Nursery Rhymes and we showed them in a performance. In groups of 5 or 6 people, we chose one of the Nursery Rhymes worked in class, and we sang them twice in front of the rest of the class.

Nursery Rhymes were the approach to new language since we were only 3 years old, and consequently very important to us, although we didn´t understand what the song was about. Nevertheless, that strange lyrics and hard and old vocabulary, today makes more sense because Nursery Rhymes were not originally created to entertain children but to hide political subversive messages.  Nursery Rhymes are very useful for every year of Primary Education, if we adapt the contents and the activities to the level of each class, and can be done both at the beginning of the class, as warming-up, and at the end of the class. The students learn new vocabulary, practice pronunciation and improve fluency while learning about English culture, historical events, poems and typical places, such as in “LONDON BRIDGE”. The sentences in the Nursery Rhymes are simple and repetitive so are easier to learn and remember. These activities can highly motivate pupils because they have an active role during the lesson.  

In our opinion, the development of the class has been wonderful. We have learnt a lot of new things about the topic and how to apply it as future teachers in the classroom. Also, we have realized the steps that the teacher has followed in order to give us the lesson, in which scaffolding was everywhere. 

In our Nursery Rhyme, “London Bridge is falling down”, we have used different types of Choral Speaking techniques, such as ANTIPHON and CUMULATIVE. In the video attached (London Bridge) to this post we show the little performance that we made in class. Could you help us to find how we have introduced those techniques?  What do you think about the activities done in class?  What do you think about the methodology Raquel followed? Would you do it in another way? Which types of Choral Speaking techniques have you used and why have you chosen them? What do you think about Nursery Rhymes? Do you think you will use this tool when you become a teacher one day? Did you sing Nursery Rhymes when you were younger?

  

We would be very happy if you want to share your thoughts with us!