Puppets

Puppets are children's toys that have been used for generations to make up stories and create situations.  Children usually like these kind of toys as they can become the writer of their own stories. In addition, puppets are not just something fun to spend a good time with, but also an educational resource.

Playing with this toy has many benefits:

- It develops creativity and imagination: children can use them to create their own stories and situations. They are the ones who decide what puppets do or tell, making their imagination fly away.

- It promotes empathy: children have to get into the characters and help them throughout the story. This helps children to be in someone else’s shoe and value the feelings that certain actions can produce.

- It increases the capacity of attention: puppets foster children's concentration as they have to focus on the creation of their characters and stories. Also, if they are watching a puppet play, they have to concentrate in the story in order to understand what’s happening.

- It develops motor coordination skills: children have to coordinate the movement of their arms with the dialogue in order to give life to the character.

- It provides education in values: traditional tales that are represented by puppets talk about values ​​such as tolerance, generosity or kindness. They usually send a positive message to children.

- It helps learn through play: without taking notice children expand their vocabulary and work their logic and memory skills. Furthermore, puppets or puppets plays stimulate the child's understanding as they have to interact with the characters.

- It provides verbal communication: children establish a relationship between themselves and the character they are representing through the dialogue.

- It fosters learn to share materials and wait for their turn: in puppets plays, each character has a moment to stage their dialogue; therefore children must learn to wait their turn in order to dramatize.

Comics

As future primary teachers, it is essential to think about how important it is to teach our students to appreciate images as a way of communication; since it is an essential part when attempting to understand our society and culture. Therefore, it is very important to be aware of the fact that teaching our students to see images as a visual support to written texts and be able to interpret them, is necessary for an appropriate comprehension of books and texts. Although the comic is an underutilized resource, it would be very useful when approaching this topic.

But… what is a comic? A comic is a story made of a number of pictures. Written texts are usually not necessary, but we usually find them combined with pictures. We can see them in bubbles, posters, texts or onomatopoeias.

Using comics within the classroom fosters students’ interest in reading, because pictures help them understand the story and make the text very appealing to them. Also, comics favor criticism, creativity and synthesis ability. They provide the reader with a lot of information that the student must interpret, and it is a fun linguistic learning medium itself. It also allows us to work on the four areas of expression:

- Dynamic expression: working on the psychomotor development of the child, as well as on the body schema and on spatiotemporal orientation.

- Linguistic expression: preparing the child for reading and writing, written and oral communication, visual memory, etc.

- Mathematic expression: working on perception and visual discrimination, shapes and colors, visual memory, spatial position, etc.

- Artistic expression: stimulation through the manipulation of the sensory and motor field.

Last, I believe it is important to highlight that the comic is considered to be a literary genre. Therefore, it should be recognized as a useful didactic resource. Combining pictures and texts, we attract the students’ interest and foster a reading habit.

When should we start reading to our children?

Reading is a never-ending source of benefits for children as it helps them to develop their language skills, know the environment and the world around them and provide them with values like friendship or love. This is the reason why, we should be engaged in creating the child’s reading habit.

•         When is the right moment to start reading to children?

The child says his first word when he is about ten months old; at the age of two he has a stock of words of about two hundred words, and at the age of three of about one thousand words.  According to this, experts advise to start reading to children when they are about two years old, but... why not do it from birth as we do it with lullabies?

Story telling has many positive effects on children:

- It encourages affective communication between the child and his parents, since it establishes a close relationship between the adult and the child.

- It stimulates the child's imagination: the younger the child, the greater capacity he has for learning. Before actually start using the language to communicate with others, the child understands and produces mental representations of what he hears, thus fostering his creativity.

- It helps to develop the child’s capacity to pay attention, since you need to concentrate in order to listen to a story.

- It fosters the development of language skills and symbolic reasoning.

•          How can we introduce reading to children?

At the beginning babies do not pay attention to the content of the book; they just use it as a toy, as something to put in their mouth. However, they do start to become familiar with books and develop their psychomotor system. 

Parents are responsible for mediating between the child and the story, recreating and interpreting it. In order to catch their attention it is important to point at objects and describe the pictures in the book.

In addition, there must be books at home. But not only that, the child must see their parents use them and enjoy their reading. The future reader must grow surrounded by words.

•          How should we tell them a story?

- We must take the child’s world and previous knowledge into account, before telling a story.

- It is not necessary to be an excellent actor or storyteller for children enjoying a story. We all have the basic resources for storytelling as it is something we do every day.

- Storytelling is not something to be done only when going to sleep. Any time is good for reading.

- It is important to encourage their interest and curiosity, highlighting different details or aspects of the story.

- We should introduce rhymes or songs at the end, or during the story, since it stimulates the child's phonemic awareness.

- We must use simple and clear language and point out the drawings to which the text refers.

Poetry in Education

What is poetry? Poetry comes from Latin poesis. It is a manifestation of beauty or aesthetic feeling through words, whether verse or prose. Poetry is a fun way of teaching sensitivity and aesthetic taste, while helping students to understand the world we live in. Through poetry we foster communicative, linguistic, cultural and social skills, which are all very important in children development.

However, the problem is that we cannot teach children to like poetry, they must learn to do so themselves. In order to foster students to appreciate poetry, the teacher must provide the appropriate atmosphere: he must be able to teach students that poetry is not boring; he must be able to open up a new world to them… the magical world of words, and help them discover the world around them through their senses. In order to do so, it is essential that the teacher loves poetry himself, so that he can show that to his students. It is also very important that he plans activities in advance and provides students with the appropriate material.

But… How can we make our students be interested in poetry? First of all, the teacher should read poetry to students to stimulate poetic sensibility. Then, students must read poetry themselves, since this will allow them to feel more comfortable when dealing with poetry, they will enjoy it and they will read into it their own way. Next, they must memorize poetry, for this will give them an important cultural stock. By memorizing poetry I mean reciting it, because that will favour their self esteem. Finally, students must write down poetry themselves, which will allow them to show their personality, feelings, fears and personal experiences.

What should we read to our students?

Traditional tales were not originally written for young audiences. As a result, we find a high content of sex, violence and sadism in them.

Thus, in versions such as "Hansel and Gretel", it is the mother of the children who forces her husband to abandon them in the forest due to food shortages. The same thing happens in "Snow White", as it is her mother, and not her stepmother, who wants to end the life of the beautiful young girl because of sexual rivalry. Finally, the mother is forced to dancing to death wearing heated iron shoes. In "Cinderella", the stepsisters, induced by their mother, cut their toes and heel to fit into the golden slippers. Some birds and the blood reveal the imposters, who are hardly punished, as their eyes are ripped by some pigeons. In the traditional version of "Rapunzel", the young girl is given to a witch by her parents in exchange of food. The witch locks her up in a tower, but a prince discovers her and climbs up every night using her long braids. The result of these visits is Rapunzel’s pregnancy, who later on gives birth to twins.

Little by little, these texts were adorned and sometimes censored from edition to edition, since they reflected the extreme harshness of life in the Middle Ages. The authors of these stories had to change several details of the originals, in order to satisfy the demands of the bourgeois public.

Although today's children know about the existence of evil, death, violence... These stories are too cruel to be shown to the students in their original versions, because rather than presenting the reality to our students, we run the risk of fostering these attitudes.

However, the versions we know present to our children have a lack of realism and show a fantasy world where there is always a happy ending. Therefore, we may make our children believe that if they behave well and do everything they should do, the result will always be success and happiness.

Perhaps the best option is a mixture of both versions. A version which promotes the values ​​presented in the adapted stories, but at the same time prepares our children to face the reality of life found in the original tales.

Learning with music

Education experts have looked for teaching methods to help children learn in an innovative way when attempting to speak English. This is how Carolyn Graham’s Jazz Chants arose. These are poems that use jazz rhythms to illustrate English stress and intonation patterns. Jazz Chants provide an innovative and exciting way to improve our student's speaking and listening comprehension skills while reinforcing language structures. This method can also be used to help children learn the contents of the subjects taught in school in an easier and more effective way.

These songs are used as teaching methods because they have an easy and repetitive rhythm that encourages students to learn and improve their oral communication. By using these chants the teacher achieves more dynamic lessons that foster students to participate by clapping their hands, stamping their feet and moving their body. Jazz Chants may be use in any subject and with students of all ages. In advanced courses, we can ask them to create their own jazz chants from the contents taught in class. This promotes creativity, a sense of rhythm and communication among students. It also fosters the expectation of creating more and better songs. You can use jazz chants in different ways: to practice stress and rhythm, to help your students sound more natural when speaking English, to review important words and structures, to practice pronunciation...

In order to create a Jazz Chant we will choose an interesting topic for students. Then, we will select three words containing one, two and three syllables. The words we will use should be related to the subject we are going to teach, so the words to be used will be real language adapted to the students’ level. The words order should be the following: first the word with two syllables, then the one with three and finally the word with one syllable. This order will bring musicality to the song and will be the pattern to follow. Once created the song, we will put it into practice in the following way: first will sing the three words twice and students will clap their hands at the end of the pattern, after they will repeat the first two words twice, and finally, they will sing the pattern again. In the following video we can see how Carolyn Graham creates a Jazz Chant: 

Click to watch the video