Facilitator: week 4

Hi everyone! I am Lucía and this week my role has been the facilitator👩. That means I've been given the duty to take the leadership of the group for these days, distributing tasks and making sure that things were working fine. It was a bit exhausting at times, since we are 9 people on the group. But most of the members are always willing to help each other to make this project succeed💪

As for this week, we continued preparing the activities from "Un día en el cole de mi maestro".

On Tuesday 3rd, we had our first contact with primary school students👦👧, and I must say that it was a quite interesting experience. For some people it wasn't the actual first contact with kids, since a lot of us have taught or currently teach as a part-time job. Nevertheless, it was stimulating for all of us.

Some aspects I would like to highlight are:
- We found it complicated at first because some unexpected circumstances happened. First of all, we had only 6 kids, when we were expecting around 8. We had to make some adjustments.
- The time 🕒 was a big issue as well. I think we were a bit up to our necks. A mistake we had was trying to do too many things in a short period of time, and making these tasks too long. As a result, we've decided to shorten some of them for the next day we have storytelling, such as making the story they have to read shorter.

In my opinion, the lesson we can take from this is that we have to learn how to be flexible, because not everything can go as we expect it to go. We should always have a plan B in case something doesn't work properly. But that's what these experiences are for: to learn something from our mistakes everytime.

Apart from putting the finishing touches to the storytelling activity, this week we have also been working (and king of struggling) to make Codey Rockey work as we wanted it to. We prepared our marvelous racetrack based on Harry Potter, for which materials and tasks were distributed.

And that's been pretty much our week. We'll keep you updated. Stay tuned for a next post, where we'll tell you more about the robots activity.

See you around!😁

Analyst Ready to Analyze!

Hi again, this is Megan and this week I have been the analyst.

To begin, I would like to say that I am more tan happy to have been the analyst this week because we have been preparing a lot for this activity and I could not wait to see the result on Tuesday.


For many reasons this task has been important to all of our team. To begin, it was the first time some of our team were having the chance to be actual teachers, but I do have to admit we were lucky because three of us have quite a lot of experience teaching kids so we had a little bit of an advantage.😉😀






As a team, we decided to leave the star roles to two people that hadn´t had the chance to teach before and the result was excellent. Our two stars did a great job and we were all so proud of them. ⭐️⭐️



The week began with PLANNING, that is what we have done most of the time plan, plan, plan. To start, we had a bit of a brain storm to search some ideas and then we chose what most creative and focused ones. we needed to make sure we could carry out a meaningful learning and a great day for the children. 💪😚

Later, we had to plan what materials to use, we decided to adapt a modern cinderella play because we thought this could develop the children´s critical thinking and it is a fairy tale they would all be familiar with.
The characters we chosen for the play were characters that we knew would be familiar for the children, this way they would be motivated and we were sure they would live to pick out their characters.




Last but not least, we had to plan the time we had for each activity. I would say this was the most difficult task. The problema was clear, we wanted to do so many things in so short time.



To be honest, we all agree on the lack of time we had with the children. We would have loved to have the opportunity to spend more time with the children to be able to do more activities.
As a suggestion, maybe for the future it would be a good idea to spend a few hours with the children and not only one hour.
Moreover, as always no matter how much you plan, things can always be improved.
We all agree that we were a bit overwhelmed with nerves.



We had planned to split the group in two so all students could participate more, this went well for the first activities we had planned.

Firstly, the children read the play and each child had a role, we were suprised that they had no problem being whichever role even if it meant for a boy to play a girl or viceverse. We could tell that the kids really enjoyed this.

Secondly, in groups they had to sort out some sentences in English to create a summary. Once they had achieved this task, we had a debate about Cinderella. The children suprised us, they were so open minded considdering their age and decided they wanted to change the end (this was out aim).

Once they came up with a new ending and created a new dialogue we realised that we weren´t going to have enough time for two separate groups to do a stop motion so we improvised and said that one child had to record his voice (interprating the play) two students took the photos and the rest helped to move the characters they had previously voted for.
So in the end we only ended up with one stop motion created by the students but we were happy with that.



As a final conclussion, we have to say that we wanted to do more than was posible and this made us all stressed and a Little dissappointed,

We all got together after the activity on Tuesday and thought about posible improvements for the next activity on the Thursday.
We all came to an agreement. The first thing we did was change the timing and eliminate some of the activities we had prepared although we took them in case we had spare time. Which in the end we weren´t able to use.
The second decission was to take turns between us as teachers, with the children. Obviously there are many of us and we all want to participate as much as posible but we had to be patient and remember we are all a team.
Finally, we realised that we didn´t have to worry to much and concentrate more on the children having a good time and more importantly, on the final task.



We managed Thursday really well, we all left with a much better feeling than on Tuesday and can´t wait for next Tuesday to continue with "Un día en el cole de mi maestro".
This is an excellent activity that we are all so happy to be part of and think it is crucial for us to realise if we are prepared to be teachers and to face the reality in education.
Being in contact with these pupils is the only way to put in practice what we are learning and always be willing to improve. Thanks Linda for giving us this amazing opportunity. 😊

TRANSLATORS: WEEK 4

Hello readers!✋ We are this week's translators🌍 Marina and Patricia, this week has been  a bit stressful😠 because we have started the activities of "Un día en el cole de mi maestro", so we have been quite busy🕮 these days. But this week has also been really entertaining!, meeting the kids😛 has been incredibly funny. These are some of the concepts that we have used the most during these days while the performance of our activities and also while preparing the tasks of the next week:

Codey rocky🤖 : The codey rocky is a robot presented by the company Makeblock, which includes various sensors that allow it to be codified in order to follow several different functions. These functions are developed thanks to an app.

Makeblock (app)📲: It is the app that we have used in order to codify the Codey Rocky. It can be used from different devices such as mobile phones, computers, laptops, etc. It has different options, it counts with a tutorial, you can guide the robot by drawing or by codifying, etc. It is quite easy to use, and very entertaining! 

Chrom ville science (app)📲: The web page of Chrom ville has an educative purpose, to make the children learn about science, it has different drawings to colour, and  after that, the drawings can come alive thanks to the app, which, thanks to the technology of augmented reality, the drawings can be shown in 3D on a mobile phone’s screen. 

Stop motion studio (app)📲: It is the app that we have used for the storytelling task, this app creates terrific stop action movies with a whole host of unique features. The stop motion video is created frame by frame and photo by photo. It has been quite useful for this task and really easy to use. 

ID badges🆔: A card that shows  the official identity of the person who wears it. This week we have created our own ID badges, with our name, the name of our group and the specific task of that day. Also, the students of our group had one in order to distinguish each group from the rest. We haven't found any weaknesses within these apps🖁, they are all very easy to use, the kids understood them since the first moment, in some cases even faster than us! Working with them has been an innovative way of learning new things and playing at the same time, and the same with the Codey Rocky🤖, although it was a brand new thing for us and for the pupils, we understood it in a moment and the only weakness that we could noun is the lack of time for using them with the kids. When talking about the ID badges, they have been quite useful for distinguishing which students were in our group and also for identify ourselves as a team. We hope you enjoy this week's post, bye! ❥❥

Journalists: Week 4.

Welcome back to our little space!

Throughout this week, the journalists' role has been performed by Fátima and Verónica as you probably already know if you have been following us!

We've been in charge of reporting all the starring events by our teammates and children.

The first thing which happened in the development of the activity, was the introduction carried out by our star Lorena, telling them what their tasks were going to be, what a stop-motion was, presenting them an example in the shape of a video shown by Marina and Patricia. This gave the children the energy and motivation that they were demanding to turn on their engines!

After that, they made a roleplay with an adaptation written by us, they really had fun changing their intonation and they didn't have any problem in playing roles which were not from the same sex as them.

Then, they started working, making a summary in the shape of ordering different sentences to build a proper summary, integrating English language in this activity and doing a more dynamic task.

And finally, the long-awaited moment arrived! they started creating a "collage stop-motion", but the first thing was creating the script and changing the ending, so that they made a debate to put in common their ideas. 

They really had fun choosing the ideal famous candidates to perform each role, they made the shots, moving them, while others were writing the script and another one was recording the audio!

TEAM WORK! 

While then, we as journalists were struggling to find the right place and moment to catch in the best way this amazing experience! 

We made this video to portrait our job as a team, with the final result included! We hope you like it and enjoy watching it! 

We had some technical problems with the program that we used to create this video, but finally we have solved it! 

Moreover, we have seen that the rest of our classmates made a great effort and their activities were full of creativity, we are amazed by their skills!

Having taken a look at our classmates' blogs, "The Pickles" (https://picklerict.blogspot.com/), are the ones which struck our attention, their way of documenting things using a vivid language is their biggest strength and also they have done a great job in "Un día en el cole de mi maestro", we really love their Simon's idea and organization of the next task!

Furthermore, another blog which is really helpful to have in your favourite links or even following them on instagram is "https://eltarrodelosidiomas.com/blog/". There, you will find plenty of resources to broaden your creativity and get inspiration for creating new activities. Adding to this, they upload resources almost every week and there is a part where you can find ict techniques and even courses to keep learning!

Thanks for keeping updated and we will see you in the next post documenting this fantastic opportunity!

Fátima and Verónica.

STARS: WEEK 4

Welcome back everybody to Eight Plus Half blog. We are Lorena and David and this week we've been taking the roles of stars 🌟🌟



This week has been one of the best since we started the course. The #UDCMM presentation finally arrived 😍💫!!! On Tuesday 3rd, 50 students from Juan de la Cierva's school visited us. This first session we were playing with storytelling. The preparations for this activitiy had been massive, as you have observed on previous posts. At 10.30 we were ready but also a litle bit nervous and finally a group of 6 cute children arrived 👧👦.

As stars, we were in charge of presenting most part of the activity. We made a short presentation about ourselves and we explained them what was the stopmotion about. We read our story, Cinderella, all together and aloud and we were surprised about how much emphasis they put in the lecture 😁😲. Having finished this task, they had to create a script containing the materials and characters
they chose to represent and again we were impressed abou how open-minded they were, they even include LGBTI characters, we were like:




With the scripts ready, we explain them that they had to make the stopmotion with the printables we gave them, such as Cristiano Ronaldo or Rosalía. Original, isn't it? 😋. They did an amazing job and we cannot be more proud of them. If you want to check the result, please go to our last post 😌

On Thurday 5th we received more students from Juan de la Cierva's school and we also welcomed new students from La Flota's school. On this session we had to robot with Harry Potty. Don't you remember him from previous posts? He's our baby 👶. Unfortunately, due to some problems, we only had 30 minutes to work with them but we made the most of each second. They were 10 boys and girls, which is more numerous than on Tuesday but they were quiet and obedient kids with a lot of motivation. As stars, we explained the steps they must follow so that Harry works. They understand it all perfectly and they loved our circuit. It was a thematic circuit based on Harry Potter's films with some of the locations of the films and because they were fans they were very impressed.



Now the week is over and as stars we can conclude without doubt that it has been a pleasure working with all the children. These activities have prove us that we are studying the right degree 😊😆
See you in following posts to check our evolution and work in future tasks and plase if you like this post, leave us a comment 💙💚💛💜

UCDMM: Storytelling ACTIVITY

Hey dear readers!! We want you to know about how the Storytelling activity has gone last Tuesday.
We were a little bit nervous because of this new experience. We were like that:

But at the end all have gone as we had wished. 

The students have learnt a new way of learning language using technology: Stop Motion, something that was unknown for them. But, overall the most gratifying fact was that they enjoyed the activity.
Here we have some photos in which these expectations are shown.

What surprised us was that these eleven-year-old children could come up with ideas more present in adults environment from our point of view, but that at the same time is a sign of maturity, awareness and observation of such children. They were more open-minded than we had expected.

The masks were very funny and we saw them motivated and working collectively!

                                     

And... as fruit of an effective and collaborative work this creative and original storytellying was created...

https://youtu.be/jcDDkWSiUbs

I think we formed a cute group, don't you?                            

JOURNALISTS WEEK 4: ROLES

Hi again guys! We are Verónica and Fátima and this week we have to perform journalists' role🎥🎬!




First, we will present our members' role this week:
MEGAN is the ANALYST🔍📃
DAVID & LORENA are the SUUUPER STAAARS🌟🎤
LUCÍA is the FACILITATOR🔮
MARINA & PATRICIA are the TRANSLATORS🔊🔁
ALVARO is the CURATOR FARMER📑📊

Be patient because along these days we will be updating and telling you about all the news and interesting activities that we have prepared .😏 See you soon!!!