In a CLIL environment we can use storytelling
as a tool of communication´s development with children. In this post, I am
going to explain you know about what I have learnt in class with Raquel
Fernández, our teacher of this subject at the Centro Universitario Cardenal
Cisneros and what I have explored by my own about this topic.
First of all, I am going to explain
you a little bit what CLIL is. This term means Content and Language Integrated
Learning and it refers to
teaching subjects such as science, history and geography to students through a
foreign language, created for the need to attend not only to
the linguistic, content, communicative and cognitive components involved in
this approach but also to intercultural factors.
Stories can prove to be effective tools for children to develop those
essential principles involved within a CLIL approach that include not only language
and content but also communication, cognition and culture. Stories, hence, can
contain the key 4Cs to make any CLIL experience succeed (Coyle, 1990).
This week, I have learnt a new way of telling stories following CLIL and
I discovered a children´s novelist called Michael Rosen, who is a British poet
and author of 140 books.
Michael have some interpretations of his stories in youtube like that
one, where I could appreciate that he is very onomatopoeic and very expressive
making gestures and sounds representing his stories. It helps to develop the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing and we can use them with children.
We´re going on a bear hunt
After watching this video in class, we did one activity which consisted
of representing the story of Michael Rosen – We´re going on a bear hunt.
First of all, the teacher divided the class into different groups, one
group was the family who were going on a bear hunt, another group had to
represent the grass, another group the river, etc., making the movements and
sounds of these places and here you have the result:
My opinion about this activity is that we can use stories in a different
way, is good for children to improve their reading skills but also is important
to improve another kind of skills such as social skills or communication skills
not only with their teacher but also with their peers, therefore, as a future
teachers we should make an extra effort in order to integrate different skills
in our activities. This allows them to construct knowledge and express ideas,
even with the very limited language they may have at the early stages of a CLIL
programme. Moreover, stories can help learners increase language fluency and
advance in their content knowledge.
