Group 1 - Fairytales and Creativity

PETRA I finished reading Bettelheim's book The Uses of Enchantment some time ago. But one of the lessons this week was dedicated to that, so I would like to talk about it a bit. I think that everybody knows at least a few fairy tales and is also able to summarise their contents. But mostly we remember only the very visible part of the whole story. We see the meanings of good fighting bad, weak showing hidden strength, lost being found… As Bettelheim says there is much more in fairy tales. Most of their meanings are hidden. Bettelheim points out that these kinds of stories are intended for children as they provide a specific kind of life guide only children can really understand. And it all happens unconsciously. One of my favourite parts of the book is the one where Bettelheim talks about the gender of main characters of fairy tales. Nowadays we tend to be very corect with this and don’t like to see stereotypes connected to boys and girls. Author says that regardless of the gender ...

 DRAMA I have to admit that my perspective or way of looking at drama has completely changed after working on it for a whole week. Before, I might have thought that the drama was just a simple performance and had no other purpose. Now, however, I know I was wrong. During this week, we have worked on dramatization in different ways. We have done several games to get us into the drama, which have been very valuable in getting us into this "game". For example, reading images that we created ourselves with our own bodies was very interesting because we were then, able to change the story told by our partner's body, adding our own body to the same image.  In addition, we were able to create a story in our groups. It was an interesting process to put our ideas together and at the same time think about how we were going to represent that. We also thought about whether it was going to be a process or a product. It was a long work but I think, considering the lack of experience we...

 CIRCUS AND MORE If I speak sincerely I did not see any logic in doing circus. I didn't understand the logic or the relationship of doing circus with all the things we had worked on before. The first day we had a first contact with the circus and we worked on several things such as, for example, making figures with our bodies, juggling, balance, ball games, different materials such as ribbons, hoops... I still didn't understand what was the connection between circus and fairytale. The next day we went on the trip to Strandheim and there I was able to make some connections. We were able to create a story, working on fairytales in general. In addition, we also worked on dramatization because we had to act out the story. And, on top of that, we used techniques we learned in the circus to tell the story. That is, we connected everything we had been working on before. We made an ensemble. Besides, I found it very interesting to work on making a puppet with natural materials, because...

Eva Pérez Abril CIRCUS PEDAGOGY The main theme worked on during this week was "Circus Pedagogy".  And you may wonder what it consists of. Well, after having found a very interesting Spanish article on the Internet called BORTOLETO, M. A. C. (2006). "Circus and physical education: circus games as a pedagogical resource ”, I wanted to highlight the following information that we can find in it: "Circus games are games adapted and/or created ludomotor situations based on typical circus motor skills". "The implementation of these games aims, first, to take advantage of the playful and motivational potential of these situations to bring students closer to the world of Circus, often marginalized in the educational field". "These games are an important tool for the development of sociocultural relations in a pleasant way". "The application of circus games can contribute substantially to the educational process in any field or level, and can al...

On monday this week we had an activity with the Play Outdoor class. We had a lot of circus activities within 2 hours. I don't have much to add about this. both my fine and gross motor skills are bad and I sucked at everything the teacher wanted us to do. Since she wanted to do so many things I never had time to actually try to at least do one thing right. This left me pretty frustrated and even less motivated for the trip. The first day of the trip was really cold. It was raining and 3 degrees.  We started with a couple of games. I didn't enjoy it that much since I was pretty annoyed with everything surrounding this trip. After that we had to make a fairy tale circus. None in my group weren't really sure how to do that and none of us had actual skills to put into a circus. So we decided to just do a play and give it a fun twist. As a twist we decided on 2 different things. First we decided to follow the Wolf instead of little red riding hood. But the Wolf pretended to be li...

 During drama we did a lot of different things. We started most of the mornings doing different drama games and exercises. A lot of those (including making a map for the story, walking around with a small roll in a story and a game where someone had to steal a key from under someone's chair). All the different activities game me ideas for things to try when I'm back at work. The idea for making a map together was really cool and could work with many different stories. And the game with the key makes for a fun energizer in between lessons. Besides the activities we also had to work on our own play. The process was a bit difficult at first. The teacher had a lot of feedback and ideas on how to improve. Some of the ideas we took for the play, others we ignored. On Friday all the groups performed. While interesting to see everyone's different performances, sitting and watching for a long amount of time became a bit boring. It was a good exercise to work on the fairy tale for th...