The Aventures of Tom Sawyer
During this courser, at our
highschool we were supposed to read the adaptation of Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I’m a
literature lover and I decided to start a project from the book.
On
the first session I made three groups of 4/5 students in class and made gave
them a computer. I gave them a name: Mark Twain. Their job was to look for
information about the author: where he was from, when he wrote, what he wrote
and any curiosity they found. They could look for info during that session and
takes notes to present the next session to the rest of the class, so that together
we learnt something about American literature and the author of our novel.
On
the second session, they presented the information they had found and I
explained some interesting things about his original style of writing by
bringing to class a fragment of The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Then we talked a bit about the American society
of that time and about One-Room schools as in the book Tom and his friends
study there and it could help understand a part of the book.
The
book has 8 chapters and some are longer than the others. It took us 7 sessions
to read the book and work with it. We read the chapters in different ways:
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On
some chapters, we listened to the story so that the students could notice the
difference between British and American English and so that they could pay
attention to intonation.
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On
some other chapters, we read them together and comemted it together.
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For
chapter 4 I grouped the students using the groups we created for the first
session and they read the chapter together. We used a technique called ‘shared
reading’ (lectura compatida) in which a member of the group read the first part
of the chapter, when he/she finished, the following member tried to make a
summary or explain what the first one read and the others make sure he/she
makes no mistakes and add/correct whatever needed. Then the next person in the
group reads and the following summarize, and so till we finished the chapter. I
decided to use this technique as this is one of the most important chapters in
the book and I wanted to make sure they all understood it as it would be key
for the understanding of the rest of the book. Once they were done, we created
the story together to make sure all groups had understood the story. They
specially loved reading the chapter in this way.
On
the ninth session, we revised the book by using the prezi I had created at the
beginning of the course:
They helped me create the story,
fill in the gaps, and they all got involved in the activity.
After
that, I explained them their tasks in a detailed way. They would need to do two
different activities, one for this semester and the next one for the last
semester:
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For
this semester, they will have three session including this one, they will work
with their group and they’ll have to put some pics from the book in the correct
order and create a comic from it. They’ll have to narrate what happens in the
picture and invent what the characters would say there without copying from the
book.
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For
the end of May, that is the last semester, they’ll have to expand those
dialogues we created in class (they can ask for doubts whenever they want) and
make a film out of the book. They will have to work together, the whole class,
to cover all the characters. They are told that they can omit any part they think
it is not important. To do this film, I have arranged with the TAC commission (a
commission which aims to widen the ICT knowledge of students) to teach all the
students of second of ESO to use Stupeflix to edit their films. The course was
indeed done successfully last week so the students can start the edition their
own videos any moment from now.
Here are some pictures from the comic-projects
they made in class.
To evaluate them I used two rubrics, one for
the comic and one for the video and I gave a copy to the students so that they
knew what I was going to evaluate, and we also made a test. Actually, after
seeing the results of the exam I must say that they have been great. The book
has been a success, they loved reading it, working with it and understood it. I
never had such good results in previous years.
