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.