Class Activities

As part of our work placement here in Alpedrete we are running creative writing workshops. There are two school sites that we move between, the Mataespesa Montessori and the Los Fresnos Montessori. We are doing these with three different age groups, Years eight, nine and ten. Year eight are aged around eleven to twelve, Year nine are aged thirteen to fourteen and Year ten are aged fourteen to fifteen and are currently studying A Level English.

For our first few experiences in a classroom environment we were invited to simply shadow the teachers, sit in on lessons and judge for ourselves the level of English and the student’s capability of performing the tasks and activities we had planned for the workshop. Year ten had been working on descriptive and narrative composition essays, Year nine had been studying Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Year eight had been studying detectives, so have been watching a lot of Agatha Christie to teach them problem solving. We sat in while they watched, Peril at End House, a Hercule Poirot mystery.

Our beginning activities with the students involved playing word games to strengthen vocabulary and teach them how to ask and answer questions through the English language. One of these activities involved writing words or names on a post it note and sticking it to the student’s heads and having them try to guess who they were supposed to be while asking questions to their neighbour who could only answer yes or no. This worked really well with Year eight who were enthusiastic and really enjoyed it, they asked and answered through English and proved themselves adept at following instruction. Surprisingly the Year ten group had a mixed reaction with some students doing really well and others cheating and basically speaking in Spanish and telling each other who they were without guessing. We have yet to try this with the Year nine group who have already proved a boisterous and rowdy group during regular lessons.

Another activity we used with our Year eights was to write a very short story to improve their story telling ability, show them how their characters can overcome obstacles, how they can get straight to the action without getting bogged down in description and how to problem solve. The activity required them to choose items from a pre approved list on the board. They were split into groups of four and each member of the group got to choose an item, once an item was gone it could not be chosen again. They each took their turn and were assigned a character and along with their four items had to create a story involving how their character used these items to either escape from a deserted island or survive on it. The students proved incredibly imaginative with some off the wall ideas and interesting uses of the islands resources and items at their disposal.

Collection of group work from Monday

We decided to make things interesting for ourselves by giving them character names belonging to friends from our class ( Jamie Byrne, Peter Dune, Mark Galvin and Alan Hogarty ) and of course our course coordinator  Colin Carters. The students provided us with sketches of what they imagined their characters looked like in addition to the stories they had imagined for them. We will be conducting this activity with the Year nine and ten group as soon as we have them.

Portrait of the character Colin Carters as drawn by the Year 8.