MULAN

Hello everyone :)
I am here again and this time I want to talk about a story we have seen in class during these weeks, "Mulan". I am sure that most of you have seen the Disney film about this story but I want to show you more interesting thing about this amazing story.

First of all, just in case you have not seen the movie, I am going to tell a sumary of this story. Mulan is the daughter of a Chinese family. One day, her father is called to fight in the war against the Huns who are trying to kill the emperor and conquer China, but her father is too old to fight and she try to avoid it, but she can´t. Then Mulan decides to cut her hair, take her father´s weapon and armor and go to the war as a boy to safe her father. She is not alone, the ancestors of the family send a dragon to help her, but accidentaly, Mushu, another little dragon destroy the big dragon and he goes with her.

In the army she starts having some problems because she is weaker than the rest of people, but with force she improves her skills and she becomes in an authentic soldier.

Later, while they were in am expedition, they met the Huns and they have to figth against them but the Huns are too much higher in number so Mulan decide to throw a rocket to the montain and the snow fall over the Huns. Li, the captain has been hurt and Mulan also but they get to survive but Mulan is very injured so they need help.

While she is in bed, Li discovers that she is a girl and not a boy as she said. Li, very hungry said that he doesn´t want to see her again.

Mulan, stays in the mountains very sad and suddenly she discovers that the Huns have survived and she decides to go to the festival where they partners are to warn them. When she arrives there, Li doesn´t believe her but suddenly, the falcon of the leader of the Huns appears and take Li´s sword and catch the emperor.

Finally, Mulan with the help of Li and her partners fight against the Huns in the palace and they achieve to bit them thanks to the great ideas of Mulan. After that Mulan decides to go back home.

Now that you know the story of Mulan, I want to say that this story is based on a real Chinese legend called Hua Mulan. As the girl of the movie, the girl of the legend also goes to the army instead of his father because he is too old to fight aswell but the end of the story is a little bit different. Both of them achieve to win the Huns but, in the movie, as I said before, they discovered she was a girl during the action and, on the other hand, in the legend, they don´t do it. When Mulan bit the Huns, the emperor offers her (he thought she was a boy) an important charge in the army but she doesn´t acept and goes back home as the girl of the movie. In the legend, their partners go to visit her and he discovered her secret in that moment.



And what about the critics of the film? Most of them was really good, people thoguht that this film was great, the animations were fascinating and the argue was really good. The feminist sector said that this film eliminated the sexist topics but they also said that they didn´t really like the end of the movie because, after showing the power of the woman they return into a fantasy world because Mulan goes back home.

In china, the movie was not really good acepted, they didn´t like a lot how they represent the culture, they thought that Mulan was very individualistic, and they said that Mushu was not a Chinese dragon. However children in China liked a lot this film.

Disney didn´t like so much the idea that a dragon goes with Mulan because they are too big, but she decided to create Mushu because they discovered that Chinese dragons could hace different sizes. As a curiosity, in the Spanish version, this character was dubed by José Mota.




At the end of the class, Raquel ask us to answer two questions and I would like to share with you my answers. The first one was:

What would have happened if Mulan was a boy? I think that if Mulas is a boy there were no problems but the story wouldn't has the same meaning. Instead of his father, the emperor Would have called him to fight and it would be another action film like others.

The second one was:

What do you think about the end? In my opinion the end is very good, Mulan get her goals, safe her father and then she goes back home with him. In adittion, I think that she could stay with the army defending the country because she has shown that she is able to do it and perhaps the society would have change and women could go to the army with men.


To end up with this post, I want to say that, personally, Mulan is one of my favorite disney movies because it changes completely the role of the Disney princess and the argue is very interesting and I enjoy a lot watching this movie.
I hope you like this post ;)

Alberto.

I Can Tell It !!!

Hello everyone :)

Today, in this post, I want to talk about the workshops that we (me and my classmates) did on Tuesday 26th of november at university. We did it with children of the second course of primary education and they were about fairy tales and the objective of the workshops was that children remembered some famous fairy tales.

My mision during this day was to be responsible of a group of children and help and guide them through the different workshops. After the project I felt very lucky because, thanks to this mision I could see most of the workshops that my partners had prepared.

So, let me show you, what we did with children and wich fairy tales I found with my group of children:

First of all we go to Cinderella´s workshop. There we found really nice characters like the king, the prince, the evil stepmother, the fairy god mother, two little mice and even the real Cinderella. That was a nice experience for children because I think that they didn´t expect to find something like this in a class.  In this picture you can see all the characters that were in this place. They look very nice, don´t they?

In this workshop children had to read the book of Cinderella with the help of two of these characters and they had to select one picture that corresponded to the part of the text that they were reading in order to complete the book. Then children noticed that there were some mistakes in the book, and that was right because, the second thing they had to do was to detect the mistakes of the story. For example, instead of two stepsisters, in this book there were four, or, instead of a pumpkin it was an apple.

In this picture you can see my mates, Rebeca and Edu, helping children to stick the pictures in their correct places.





Finally, to end up with this workshop, children had to think about their favorite part of the story of Cinderella and they had to represented it with a frozen frame.

When we finished with Cinderella we go to Agrabah to meet Aladdin and company. This place was really well decorated, it seemed that it was not a class. As in the previous one, here we could meet some characters of the story such as the main character, Aladdin, or Yasmin, The sultan, the little monkey Abu, Yafar, etc. Here you can see better what I am talking about.

In this workshop, the parrot, that was my classmate Noelia, started telling the story of Aladdin but, at the middle of the story she said that she had lost the rest of the story and children had to continue with it. To do it, first of all, they, all together, called the genie. The genie appeared from the lamp and invited children to come into his lamp and there they found some pictures that they had to order to finish the story.

Then, when we finished, we go to Snow white world where we meet her and also the prince.

In this workshop, first of all, they had to wear a bonnet as if they were the seven dwarfs with their names on it. Then they had to complete a puzzle in which they had to order the story of Snow white. In this puzzle there were some pictures that the had to put in the correct order to complete the story.

Then, children were divided in two groups and the played a kind of trivia. The prince asked questions related with the story and children had to answer rising their hand. The first person who rised the hand had to answer and if the answer was correct, he or she get a point for his/her team.


Finally, we had the opportunity to visit a forest, but not a normal forest, it was the forest in which the three little pigs live.

In this place, children found, first of all, the three little pigs dancing very happy and they were singing a song. Then they told children that they had a problem, and the problem was that the wolf wanted to eat them, and, in that moment, the wolf entered into the class and told us that he was gonig to come back. So, three little pigs asked children to help them to build their houses, as you know, one made of straw, another one made of wood and the last one made of bricks. To do that the also had the help of three characters that were invited to the story, a little mouse, a fairy and a lion and children started building the houses very quickly before the wolf came back.

Finally, when the wolf returned, each group had invented a plan to scare the wolf, for example, the fairy became the wolf into an ant, the lion roared the wolf and then they ate him with spoms...
Finally the sing all together the song that the three little pigs were singing at the beginning.



That were the four workshops that we had the oportunity to see, but there were two more.

We also had the Olympus at the university and children could meet Hercules and have a good time with the characters of this story.

And finally we also had our own Wonderland here where children could meet Alice, the white rabbit, the Queen of hearths and even the crazy hatter :)

As a conclusion, I am sure that all of us, students and teachers, had a really good time and enjoyed a lot this activity. For me, it was a nice experience to share what we have prepared with real children and see if they like it. I hope I can do things like this when I´ll be working in a school because I think that all of us need to smile and spend a good time like this once in a while :D

Library Project

This post has been written by Ester Prieto and me.

We want to talk you about the library project we developed some weeks ago in Raquel's class.

Our library (the object) is not bought neither made of wood, it is painted in continuous paper with pencils. The library has three levels in wich children can find their books.

The books that we have in our library are not real ones, we mean, we don't have physically the books in class. The thing is that children have to read a book that they have at home, then they have to do in a drawing in a paper in wich they can show what is the book about and if they like it or not. This paper, that we call curler, will be posted in the library using velcro. After that, children have to take one curler and see the picture, if they like it they have to ask for the book to the partner that has done the drawing. Next day children give the books to the partner that has asked for it and they read it. This process will be done as many times as children want, because we want to engage children reading not to transform it in a compulsory activity.

So, as you can see, the budget we need to create our own library is really cheap, because we only need to buy velcro to post the curler into the library and it costs about 5 €, due to it is thought that the rest of the materials (continuous paper, pencils and papers) can be found in the school.

To carry out this project we also need one person in charge of the library. The work of this person is to collect in a notebook the people that take books, when they do it and when they bring them back to the class. This in charge changes along the year, it is always a student, one week per each.

We have thought not only about having a library in our class, we think it is a wonderful idea to have one in all classes. If we do it children will visit the rest of the classes to see their libraries, their books and to exchange curlers with partners of other classes. That would be a good activity to work on Literature but also in values, for example the values of: sharing, caring, communication and companionship.

Finally, we want you to have clear that this kind of library can be developed in any age. However, we have to change the content of the curler. The older they are, the more information the curler should contains. For example, they could make a short description about the book or the protagonist or whatever they want to transmit.

We hope you like our project :)

Ester and Alberto ^_^

E.B. White

Hello everyone. In this post I want to talk about a great author whose name is Elwyn Brooks White (E.B. White). I want to talk about this author because I knew him a few weeks ago and I liked a lot his books.

Elwyn Brooks White was bornt in Mount Vernont, New York, in 1899. He was a publicist and in 1925 he published his first article in "The New Yorker" magazine.

He wrote some important books such as "The elements of style" or "The Supremacy of Uruguay". But he became really famous because of three science fiction books for children.






The first book for children was "Stuart Little". I am sure that all of you know this book, maybe bacause you have read the book or maybe because you have seen the film. 
Stuart Litlle talks about a mouse that is adopted by a family of humans, the Little family. The parents of the family are very happy with their new son but, the oldest son, George, doesn´t know what can he does with his new brother. The cat of the family, Snowbell, is going to invent a plan to eliminate Stuart from the family.

I think that with this book children can learn a lot of things, for example, they can learn that it does not matter the aspect of a person and friendship is very important.



The second book for children that E.B. White wrote was "Charlotte´s Web". This book tells the story of a pig, called Wilbur that is in danger of being slaughtered by a farmer. The pig has a friend, a Spider whose name is Charlotte. The spider will help the pig writing messages in her web to persuade the farmer and Wilbur could live. 

With this book children can learn that it is important to help others and to be worried about the people around you.




The last book I want to show you is "The Trumpet of the Swan". This book tell the story of a swan that has a problem, he can´t talk. He is a very clever and handsome swan and he wants to impress a girl but she ignore them because of his problem. His father decides to give him a trompet and with this instrument he will do fascinating things.

This book is really good for children to see that they can do a lot of things if they put a lot of effort on it.




As you can see, all of these books talk about animals that, in my opinion, is a topic that engages a lot to children.
Finally, I want to highlight the importance of these books saying that all of them have been adapted to the cinema.

Important books in my life

Last week, we have done an activity, called "reading map", in which we have to show in a drawing the books that we have read during all our lives. For example, I decided to do a kind of underground map in which each station was a book. In this map there was four different lines, the green line, in which there were there were books that I read in infant education; the brown line, for primary education; the blue one, for secondary and bachelor; and finally the red one for the university.

This activity have helped me to remember some books that I have read and I enjoyed them a lot. With this post I want you to know whichs ones were my favorite ones and why, and also, I want to recommend you some of these books.

The first book, is probably the book that I have enjoyed the most, because it was a book that, for me, was different than the other that I had read. It was different because it has adventure, emotion and even a little bit of fear. I am talking about "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets". Before that book I read the first part of the saga "Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone", and they are really different from my point of view and thats what I liked of this book. 

The second book that I remember is "Narnia Chronicles: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". This book tells the story of four orphans brothers that suddenly go into a parallel word called Narnia. In this word, always is winter because a witch domains it. The mision of these four brothers is to create an army with the help of a Lion, Aslan, to beat the witch and let the spring comes back to Narnia. This book is really fascinating and I´m sure that you will enjoy reading it. I recommend you.



The last book that I want to tell you I have read it recently, one or two months ago. The book is called "Inferno" and the writer is Dan Brown (maybe you know him because he has wroten books like "Da Vinci´s Code" or "Angels and Demons"). The main character of this novel is Robert Langdom, a proffesor of symbology and iconology in a university in the United States. The book begins when Robert wakes up in a hospital and doesn´t remember why is he there. He will have to discover what have happened and why some people are following him. But he is not alone, she will met Shiena Brooks, a doctor who works in the hospital where the story start. During the story he will discover that they had to avoid a global catastrophe and they don´t have a lot of time. And I don´t want to tell you more about this story, you have to read it if you want to discover what happens.

These are probable the three books that I choose among all the books that I have read during all my life and they have been important for me because, they have achieved that I read a little bit more. In fact, nowaday I am reading a very big book called "The fall of the Giants" and I am enjoying it a lot.

Story telling

Hello everybody. 

In my first post I want to talk about story telling that we have been seeing during this week in class. I have decided to write about story tellling because it´s a topic I like a lot. I really enjoy listening or reading stories and also I enjor telling them. 

With this post I want to show you that stories don´t have only the objective of entertain children or make them fall sleep. The story telling is much more than these things.


For me, one of the most important part of stories is the moral that you take from them. Children can learn a lot from a storie with a good moral, for example: "The fox and the grapes", "The hare and the tortoise" etc. I think this kind of stories can teach a lot to children.


Another objective that children can achieve with stories is to improve some capacities while they are listening to them. They develop their understanding, their listening capacity and their concentration among others. 


And the last thing that I want to comment for the moment is that, with stories, children also can learn a lot of different thigs about the daily life. I think that, as far as possible, we have to contextualize the storie, in order to make children feel inside the storie. 


I would like you to commment in this post and tell us, any other things children could take from stories, and I would also like to know your opinion about what I have said in this post. 


Here you have a storie that I have learnt recently and I liked it very much and I hope you enjoy and take something from it ;)



THE LITTLE CHILD

This is the storie of a little child. He was a very good student, he helped a lot at home, he was very sympathetic with his friends, but something in his head made them feel worried. He admired his father, he was a business man, he had a very good job and he earned a lot of money.

One night, the little child decided to wait his father in the bed and when he arrieved to home the child called him and he said to him:
- "Dad, How much money do you earn in an hour?" - the child said.
- "I don´t know"- said the father -"maybe 100 € in an hour. Why?"
- "I wanted to know it"- said the child.
-"Ok, now is time to sleep"

During the following week, the little child asked for some money to his grandmother, mum, ancles, aunts,... and he could get 70 €.

another night he talked with his father again:
- "Dad, Can you give me 30€? I need it to buy a very important thing" - Said the child
- "Ok, here you are" - And the father gave the money to his son - "Now, is time to sleep"
- "No wait" - said the child - "look. I have 100 €. They are for you, I want to buy you one hour ! Sometimes I feel alone. I want to be with you, at least, one hour"