TITLE OF THE ACTIVITY: STORYTELLING FOR KIDS
AUTHOR: Belén Pascual
GROUP: 2º Educación Infantil /Year 2 Early Years Education
LANGUAGE: English
I chose eight tales for the students to work with. The chosen stories were well-known among English speaking kids around the world and the selection included a wide variety of stories,including from modern ones to some which were a bit old-fashioned. Some of them also incIuded gender stereotypes. I wanted my students to be aware of the language conventions the authors used depending on the times.
LESSON PLAN:
• We devoted two lessons of 55 minutes to carry out the activity. In the first lesson, I divided the students into groups of four and I handed the different books for them to read the stories and analyse them working on the following aspects:
- Title and author
- Plot
- Visual strategies
- Literary strategies
- Moral
- Analysis of stereotypes
This first part of the activity lasted for about one hour because although the stories were neither long nor complex, they had to analyse them in depth trying to look for the elements that made them attractive and popular for kids.
• In the second part of the activity, we did a proper storytelling activity by sitting on the floor all together and telling the tales as if we were doing that with kids. We practised the tone and the voice; we used some storytelling strategies and we also shared the ideas that had been discussed previously by the different groups.
The students really liked the activity and participated actively using the English language as a means of communication. It was a motivating way of working with literature in class, putting into practice grammar structures such as past simple or past continuous and learning about storytelling which was the goal of the unit we were studying at that time.