STORYJUMPER: SPAIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES

 

Personally, I am a great reader and moreover, I love writing short stories about feelings and rhymes.

The discovery of the tool “StoryJumper” make me feel so happy, because I can use it with my students. Even this year I don´t teach in Infant Education, I hope to do it next year and take the advantage of this amazing tool and write my own tales related to the topics taught.

I am going to explain the organization of my activity, the sequencing of the tasks, the objectives, the drawbacks and the benefits.

The activity is related with TOPIC 3 of SOCIAL SCIENCES: SPAIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

My students have designed a book with examples of main characters of this period in our country.

 1º. Establish the different periods of the Middle Ages: The Visigoths, Al- Andalus, The Christian Kingdoms and The Reconquista.

 2º. I use a dynamics with the card game “The Mind”, which consists of give them a card (each card has got a number from 1 to 100). Then, I write four numbers on the board (each number is associated with one history period) and they have to find the number of the board that it is closer to his or her card.

Which this dynamics, we made the goups and divided up the topics.

 3º. Later, I showed them a video with some characteristics of each period.

 4º. They looked for information about the main characters in books, on the Internet, Youtube…

 5º. They wrote in their notebooks about the different characters that were important in these periods.

 6º. We made a “Timeline” in the classroom with the different periods and characters (it is very useful the tool that we used at the beggining of this course “TimeToast”).

 7º. They gave me the writings and I chose some of them for the book.

 8º. Each group made an oral presentation ofi each period for the rest  of the classroom.

The objectives presented in this type of task are:

-          - Be capable of summarize the information.

-          - Get a general idea of each period.

-          - Learn specific information about the main characters of each period.

-          - Use new technologies as a help and as a way of improvement of the Digital           competence.

-         -  Employ good pronunciation and entonation in the oral presentation.

 

Imagination and creativity are presented every day in our class. I make my students participants in the creation of tasks and I ask them for their opinions at the beggining and at the end of each unit.

In this activity, their imagination and creativity were shown because:

-          -  They chose the music for the book (they thought is motivating for our                   book)

-          - They decided to choose me as a protagonist of the story.

-          - They selected the scenes.

-          - Some of them, were characterized for the oral presentation.

My group enjoyed the most working together and looking for information, they are tiny detectives. On the other hand, they don´t like to write on the notebooks and some of them are less confidents in the oral presentations.

Maybe, for the next time, these are things that I have to change and give them the opportunity of show me other different alternatives in which they feel more relaxed.

As I said before, to finish the evaluation process I gave my students a test of co-evaluation (in which they evaluate the work of the classmates of their group), and a self- evaluation in which they evaluate themself and in the last question they give me suggestions for future activities.

I hope you like this activity and share with me your impressions. 

OUR BOOK ABOUT MIDDLE AGES IN SPAIN