Good evening everybody. My name is Louise Connolly and I'm the head of the Educational Consultants Department at Macmillan in Spain and I would like to welcome you all to the third and last round of the Macmillan online Teachers Day which is aimed at teachers of pre-primary and primary. For those of you who attended the online events in March and April I would like to welcome you back and I'm delighted that you could join us again this evening. For those of you for whom it is the first time joining us a very very warm welcome. With these online events, our aim is to offer you quality, ongoing quality teacher training.
We hope to give you practical solutions, ideas, activities that we hope you can put to immediate use in your classes. I would like to mention something that's very dear to our hearts. For those of you who attended the online events last year, you will remember that we were celebrating the 30th anniversary of Macmillan Inspiration. Spain. Well this year, 2018, we are celebrating the 175th anniversary of Macmillan in the publishing world.
In 1843, Daniel and Alexander Macmillan founded Macmillan, the company, and made their mark, a really, really important mark, on the publishing world with the publication of such universally loved writers and poets. such as Thomas Hardy, Lewis Carroll, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Rudiak Kipling and WB Yeats to name but a few. This year we're celebrating 175 years and we're very proud of this. And also to celebrate we would like to run a competition on social media, on our Facebook and Twitter. We would encourage you to post a comment either on Facebook, Twitter or Facebook Facebook or Twitter and we will select 10 winners.
And those 10 winners will receive a very special 175th Macmillan Anniversary Prize. So please post your comment either on Twitter or Facebook. Some of you are users of Macmillan courses and you have access to the Macmillan Advantage scheme.
Others may not be but may be in the future and you will have access to this scheme which is called Macmillan Advantage. And there you have access to a whole range of materials and resources. You can access rubricas, programaciones.
You can also watch the recordings of these events. You can learn about Macmillan. teacher training events, etc. etc. So please do bear that in mind.
With these events, we want to encourage interaction between you and the speakers. And to that end, we've introduced some interactions which, for those of you who attended the events in March and April, you will remember that we have what you call Have Your Says, which is an open question which will appear on your screen, and all you have to do is write a very short question. short answer or a poll which would be a question with a multiple choice answer ABCD etc okay and all you have to do is choose the correct option for you the other thing I wanted to mention is we'd love to hear from you about your experience of attending these online events so if you would like to post a comment you can do so on our Twitter account which is hashtag Macmillan online teachers day so please do post a comment Finally, but most importantly of all, I would like to introduce our first speaker, Carol Reid.
Most of you will know that Carol is a very, very much loved, very popular author of primary courses such as Tiger, which is such a popular course in Spain, and also of methodology courses for teachers such as 500 activities. in the primary classroom and today Carol would like to talk to us about the magic of storytime. Welcome Carol. Thank you Louise, thank you very much for that lovely introduction and it's wonderful for me to be here to spend the next half an hour with you talking about one of my favourite areas of English language teaching for children and one that I believe can help us produce ...the most effective and successful results. And the magic for me of storytelling lies in the fact that stories provide shared context for natural language development and a way to engage our students'hearts and minds over issues that are relevant, real and important for them.
And in our everyday lives we're always telling each other stories as this question arises. quote from Jerome Bruner shows and I think when Louise and I saw each other this afternoon we were immediately telling each other stories about the weekend we'd had, how we'd got back home and so on. And Jerome Bruner talks about how important it is to nourish children's imagination, to develop in them a narrative sensibility so that they too can develop their own identities.
and become capable of telling their own stories themselves. And in this next quote here by Alastair MacIntyre, which is one that I love, Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted. What Alastair MacIntyre is getting at here is that if we don't expose our children to stories, we actually impoverish them in learning how to construct their own identity and tell stories in their own lives. And I think although Jerome Bruner and Alastair McIntyre are talking about children's development in their first language or their mother tongue, we can see that the same thing is very often true in our foreign language classes with children. And so moving straight on to my first question to all of you out there, because I'm sure that many of you agree with this passionately.
otherwise you wouldn't be here this afternoon. Why do we use stories in our lessons with children? Would you like to have your say and tell us some of the reasons? Great, so as I said at the beginning this question will appear on your screen now, so we'll give you a couple of seconds to write a short answer.
You don't have to write complete sentences, just key words to answer the question. And it will be lovely to see some of your ideas. Exactly.
Ah, very quick off the mark, Lorena. Lorena Maria Lovato, 10. They are really motivating. Children like them a lot. Absolutely, and I think you've really, you know, hit the nail on the head there, because motivation.
is so important and if we succeed in motivating our children that's not just 50% of the battle but at probably 90 or 95 percent it's also easy to get them involved says Maria Dolores Milan. Lovely Maria Dolores, absolutely easy to get them involved and it's like a shared social community event that has all our children focusing on the same thing at one time. Exactly and Merce Latore says that it's a really good way to teach values.
Absolutely an excellent way to teach values and a little later on in the session we'll see an example of that and I think what's important also it's a way to teach values in a way that is like rather than heavy-handed a way that actually allows children to internalize and develop values for themselves and an interesting comment from Laura Martinez she says that children often feel themselves identify with the characters that's such a good point because this identification with the characters and also can help children often to deal with issues that are really relevant and important for them but would actually be a little bit threatening to talk about directly. So for example things to do with maybe being scared of the dark, something like that, that you don't want to directly talk about that with a child and through a fictional character you maintain that kind of distance. So what lovely points. Anything else? Yes, let me just say it's a great way to learn in context so it provides obviously a good context Martha Sanchez is saying, yes.
Absolutely a lovely. Natural context for meeting new language in a way that allows children to discover meaning. Exactly. Somebody, I can't say their name now, but mentioned about the cultural aspect.
Very important. Bringing culture into the classroom. Very important. And this often may be implicitly through particular stories. It may be just in the images of a story, for example, that may show.
a house for example of a particular culture or it may be explicit when there's a story from specific culture that we're telling our children. That was actually from Ana Belén Sánchez, so thank you. Ana Belén, thank you.
Lovely points. I mean a lot of people are saying also, Ana Laudo is saying they love stories. Stories are fantastic to introduce, reinforce structures, the language aspect. Absolutely. More than one person has mentioned that.
Absolutely. So some fantastic points here. Yes. And in a way I think it's quite helpful for us to look at reasons for stories under these... separate five headings and a lot of your points already cover some of the things that we might say.
First of all the language in context which allows for discovery of meaning, it allows for comprehensible input, children understand the story even though they may not necessarily understand every word. It also allows of course for recycling and practising new... or familiar structures and vocabulary.
And of course, stories provide a springboard for a whole range of multi-sensory language activities. And I think above all, they can inspire children to want to join in and to participate and to use language. In terms of the learners themselves, stories provide a link between the home context and the school environment.
school context. Children, most children at least, are familiar with stories at home and when we do stories in our language classes this reinforces things that they already know and find pleasurable in their home background. And of course also in terms of the learners, stories cater for diversity.
All of us, no matter how big our classes are, have unique children. with unique individual profiles and stories allow children to participate and learn at the rate and level that they're ready to do so. In terms of skills, of course stories provide opportunities for us to develop the four language skills, speaking, listening, reading and writing, but also importantly stories provide a very rich opportunity for developing thinking skills, prediction, hypothesising, logical deduction, creative and critical thinking that our children need so much these days.
And as well as thinking skills, stories also help us to develop social skills, social skills such as listening and turn-taking and things through the stories themselves, the values issue that was mentioned earlier, such as empathy. structure of stories, young children, even though they can't maybe articulate it, they are well aware that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, and that stories, there is often some kind of conflict or problem that is resolved during the story. And this knowledge of the structure of stories helps our children to expect to know what's going to happen at the end. of a story, for example. And also, many children's stories have a repetitive or a cumulative discourse pattern.
And of course, this naturally gives plenty of opportunities for children to hear repeated language patterns that they internalise and then produce. And finally, with the content of stories, we had the lovely mention of culture earlier, but stories also very often the content of stories help us to make links between English and other areas of the curriculum and also to deal with issues such as well I mentioned earlier being scared of the dark or not wanting to eat particular kinds of food that is actually important and relevant for children and so a mass multiple reasons for using stories with children in our classes and what I would like to do this afternoon is to present and exemplify a very simple but actually a very solid and pedagogically useful model methodological model for working with stories in our classrooms and this I call it a basic three-stage model Plus and the first stage is pre storytelling in other words everything we want to do before the story to prepare the children for the listening while storytelling it's not right science the things that we do during the storytelling to make the storytelling event successful and surprise surprise post storytelling the things that we do afterwards to consolidate develop understanding, transition from receptive understanding to productive. And my plus here, particularly thinking of our younger children, is to do with the home-school links.
That actually what children learn at school it's very important that this or an element of it goes home and that there is this mutual reinforcement of what is happening with parents and carers at home. as well as teaching and classes at school. So what I would like to do now is to actually have a look at how the model might work in practice and I've chosen to use with you this afternoon a story from the materials that I've done recently with Mark Ormerod, New Tiger, but I would like to say straight away that you don't have to use this story, this is an example.
So the model and the ideas of things you can do can be applied to other stories. You may be using class readers, for example, or picture books. So this is just an example. So let's have a look then, first of all, before the story. And before the story, very often, it's appropriate to introduce some of our key vocabulary that is going to be added.
activated during the story and to do different kinds of flashcard games and activities for children to have a receptive understanding of that vocabulary and also begin to produce it. And we may use digital flashcards as you can see on the screen now or we may use traditional flashcards and in fact I think it's very useful to alternate what we use because we provide variety and balance. balance like that.
So we could use these traditional ones and do all kinds of different activities. For example, one that I'm sure many of you will know, which is called What's Missing, where we display six to eight flashcards, we ask the children to close their eyes, we remove one flashcard and the children guess what's missing. And I'd like to ask you now for your next Have Your Say.
opportunity what ideas for flashcard activities or games to practice vocabulary do you use I'm sure you've all got lots of ideas and it would be lovely to share some of them so you'll see the question on your screen now and if you give me a couple of seconds to write in just again short answers I'm thinking of one can I say one you're allowed to say one yes Louise no I I have a favourite one which is with the swat. Oh lovely. I love it. With the fly swat.
But you have to be careful that it doesn't get out of hand. Health and safety. And health and safety, exactly.
But it does work very well. Let's see now. Just give people a minute or two.
Another one that I like to do is with the gradually reveal. Gradually reveal, the flash card. In fact, I can show you that one now.
Yeah. Actually on screen, you gradually reveal the picture. and the children have to guess what the animal is. And you can do the one behind your back, you can producing it, or you can do the one, which I always call flash, which is like this. Are you ready?
Eyes this way. and it's an... Oh yes, I like that one. It's an elephant.
Okay, so we've got lots of answers. Thank you very much everybody for writing in. Rosa Echeburua is saying, I use pictures and words and they have to match them.
Fantastic. That is absolutely a lovely idea, especially when we're introducing the idea of global word recognition to the image. Exactly.
And Reyes Monteagudo is saying, my students love playing... a kind of twister game with them. Twister game?
I remember playing twister when I was a kid. Lovely, lovely. Larry Vinacua saying matching words to pictures students have to make partners if they have the same object picture word right then they they match up right so it's match your but find your partner find your partner with exactly lovely idea and I love the way that that has kinesthetic movement so the children are actually getting out and finding yes and that's really important isn't it because sometimes with the digits so we need to find a balance yes and it could also be linked to a little bit of language practice have you got an elephant and you've got a giraffe and so on. Tina Nicholls says ah flashcards stepping stones. Oh lovely.
To advance across the imaginary path. Okay that's a very nice idea. Imaginary pond sorry you must say the words for the flashcards okay in order to get across the pond. Fantastic. That's a lovely idea.
And there's a little bit there's a kind of digital version of that with a maze where you have to listen to the flashcard word and then move move to the appropriate square. Who's missing? Elena Lucia Perez? Exactly. Thank you very much.
Hot and cold whispered the... Exactly. And one more.
Shall I just give you one more? Please do. memory game, flash game, miming. Several people have mentioned about miming.
And, oh, yeah, and Maria Pilar Perez says, I stick them all around the classroom and they point at them when they hear the word. Fantastic. Okay, so lots and lots of ideas there. And I would just mention, if you are interested, if you go to my website, there's actually a PDF of 30 flashcard games that you can download, you know, completely freely, of course.
and also if you go to YouTube and put Carol Reid flashcard games there's a little video of me demonstrating about 10 flashcard games. So many ideas that's really fantastic so we work on our vocabulary and moving on we want to contextualise and get children to predict what might be happening in the story. So here for example we might ask what's Tiger doing? He's obviously sleeping and we might use gesture to show that he's dreaming and he's dreaming about the animals, the children can name the animals and we might ask what happens in the dream.
And children often come up with very, very creative ideas, like it's Tiger's birthday party or, you know, one of the friends is lost, something like that. Okay, so actually moving on to the story, so we get this contextualisation and prediction, which is to get the children kind of hooked and engaged. with the story and we then give a focus for initial listening to the story so we're going to ask them in this case what's tigers problem which animal helps tiger and again we'll get the children's ideas in their own language maybe and we would recast in in in English but we need this focus to listen to the story so then what we'll go on to do is actually telling the story. Okay, but before we do that let's just recap on what we do before the story.
Before the story we need to pre-teach vocabulary, we need to create interest, curiosity and engagement, we need to encourage prediction and hypothesizing and we need to set a task to focus initial listening. We're then going to actually tell the story and of course there are many options here. We may have the books closed with the initial task that we just saw.
We may tell the story ourselves or use the audio. We might use the book of the story or story cards if we have those. Or we might use the digital version of the story and again we can add speech bubbles or not if we want or we might watch the animated version of the video. I tend to tell the story myself in the first instance but there are no correct answers to this. But what I would like to do, I will tell you the story very rapidly now.
I won't stop to ask you questions to interact because obviously you're not actually in the room with me. But what I would like to ask you to think about is what makes this a good story to use with young children. So, what makes this a good story to use with young children? So the story goes like this Tiger is sleeping He's dreaming.
He's got a sore paw. Oh I've got a sore paw and Along comes an elephant. Hello elephant, look I've got a saw paw. Can you help me please?
No, sorry, I can't. I'm scared of tigers. and the elephant goes away as fast as he can.
Oh, I've got a sore paw. Along comes a giraffe. Hello, giraffe.
look I've got a sore paw can you help me please no sorry I can't I'm scared of tigers and the giraffe goes away as fast as it can and so on with the snake and with the monkey and then I pause and I ask the children who can help tiger and they guess which animal and then we move into the last bit of the story when the mouse comes along. Ow, I've got a sore paw. Along comes a little mouse. Can you help me please? Yes, of course I can.
Oh dear, you've got a thorn in your paw. The mouse pulls and pulls and the thorn... comes out.
Oh my paw is better now. Thank you Mouse. You're welcome.
The mouse looks at Tiger. Can you help me now please Tiger? I'm a long way from home and I...
can't cross the river. Yes, of course I can Mouse, jump on my back, I can take you home. The little mouse jumps on Tiger's back, the elephant, the giraffe, the snake and the the monkey are very surprised.
Look, the little mouse isn't scared of Tiger. The little mouse and Tiger are friends. Amazing!
Okay, so that's the end of our story and we have a very quick have your say now. If you can say, I know I didn't tell you the whole story but you got the idea of the repetitive pattern, what makes this story a good story to use? with children. Okay and now we'll see we'll just give you five ten seconds to write in I know you're very quick off the mark no sooner have I finished the instructions and I've got answers coming in.
Fantastic okay fantastic Oh, thank you. Clara, Maria Clara Camps, use of different voices for the characters. Absolutely, characterisation with your voice, with your facial expression, your gesture, using your body to tell the story, absolutely.
Oh, they're all coming in quickly. Thank you. Ana Maria Perez, modelling the voice is really important. Lovely. Very good point.
Let me just go down a little bit. Oh, yeah. Repetitive structure, very important, isn't it? Absolutely. This repetitive language pattern.
So can you help me? please and that's going to be the target language that we actually work on. So fantastic.
Thank you. There's some very key reasons there. And of course we're not just going to tell the story once. We're going to give children opportunity to listen to it. to it many times and increase their participation each time.
And some activities that we can do to retell the story, say stop. So we tell the children, say stop every time you hear the name of an animal. Along comes an elephant, stop, for example.
That's not right. You change the story. You say, along comes a giraffe.
They say, no, that's not right, elephant. Okay, say the missing word. Along comes... and the children supply the word.
Repeat with your character. We get the children in groups, tiger, elephant and so on and they repeat the story with their group. And another nice activity is to order the pictures using story cards with children at the front of the class and then reconstruct the story together.
You can also do this digitally of course as well. So actually during the story what should we do? We need to use the story cards.
Use different modes to tell the story. The audio, ourselves, the video, the digital, different ways of telling the story. We always need to give a reason for listening.
We can't expect our children to focus without this support. We need to vary the storytelling activities so they don't think, oh we're doing this story again, we've already done it, we're always doing something new and refreshingly different. We need to support children's understanding.
in the way suggested with voice, characterisation, pointing to the pictures and so on and also asking appropriate questions. Appropriate questions that sometimes may be about the comprehension of the person. of the story, sometimes maybe open-ended questions to ask about how the characters are feeling.
We also, very importantly, need to encourage a personal response. Do you like the story? Why do you like the story? Which character do you like?
And so on. Moving on, one of the things that I found for many years in my experience as a teacher of children is that encapsulating the key language. of a story in a song can help children transition from that receptive understanding to using the language productively.
And here we have a song that has that key language and first of all it would be a comprehension activity. The children would listen and remember and number the animals in order and then we would sing and act out the song. We don't have time to do the whole song now but just to give you a flavor we'll listen to the first verse where we have the children acting out the story acting out the parts of tiger and the other animals together so let's just listen to one verse of the song so you can get an idea and the reason I okay I'm going to be tiger and the animal okay okay off we go can you help me please So, if you're at home... Got a sore paw today No, sorry I can't, I'm scared Okay, that's enough for you to get the idea ...of that song and actually how that facilitates moving the children on to acting out the stories themselves with a very simple cutout. We don't have time in our English lessons for children to spend a long time...
time making cutouts. So this is something very simple but it involves kinesthetic movement, along comes an elephant or whatever on the desk and children are then working with the story independently and autonomously. autonomously.
Values education which I was so delighted to hear mentioned in the first Have Your Say this afternoon and in this particular story the value which comes across is about kindness and we ask the children which animal is kind to Tiger and it's the little mouse and how are you kind to your friends and a lovely thing to do with this if you can ask your the parents of your children to send the children in with a plaster and they can put their plaster wherever they like on their nose on their hand and then we act out this little role play so I'm gonna be A and you can be B so hello Louise I've got a sore nose oh dear poor you can you help me please yes of course I can help you oh thank you Louise you're very kind okay so what we do doing here is showing the transition of the language from the story to the real world of the children and the relevance and appropriacy of that language. Similarly with classroom language. Can you help me please is very useful classroom language but we need to train our children to use classroom language.
So in this little activity for example they will be listening. Can you help me please? Yes I can or no I can't. encircling the right face.
And with my children, if I want them to remember that language, I just go to them, remember tiger? What does tiger say? And they come out with it in English. Linking the story to content. In many stories, we can extend and enrich what children are learning by linking the story to real content.
In this case, we're going to link it to actions that animals make for movies. So for example, as you can see on your screen, frogs jump, giraffes run, elephants walk, crocodiles swim, monkeys climb, parrots fly. And we're going to do games based on that and also a song which actually practices the structure can as well. A frog can jump, I can jump too. A frog can jump, can you?
So we're linking our story to content and also to culture and at this age group one of the most powerful ways of introducing culture is to actually teach children authentic rhymes songs and games that they can play so let's have a look at this now Eeny, meeny, miny, moe Catch a tiger by the toe If it screams, let it go Eeny, meeny, miny, moe You are it! Eeny, meeny, miny, moe Catch a tiger by the toe, if it screams, let it go. E-link, E-link, my Nemo, you are it! So one of the wonderful things with the playground rhyme and game like that, that you teach the children in the context of the classroom, and when they go to the playground, if any of you ever see your children playing this game spontaneously, will you please... get out your phone and make a little video and write and tell me about it because this to me is kind of proof of the pudding of our teaching when children take what we teach them in the classroom, internalise it and make it their own.
So, going back to our methodology after the story, stage three of the process, what do we need to do? What is our checklist? We need to check comprehension that children understand the story. Elicit a personal response. This is so important and builds up children's self-esteem when they realise that we're interested in what they think about the story.
Explore story values as we've seen. Creating a story. story-related song, which very often, you know, if there may not be one, you can make one up yourself using a traditional, you know, Frere Jacques is always a good tune for a story. Do communicative practice activities which show the children the relevance of the language in the story for their real lives and communication. Work on pronunciation.
We haven't seen an explicit example of this in my story today, although actually that so po- is a wonderful practice of the English disc film, saw paw, and whether you do it implicitly or explicitly you might want to focus on the for monkey or for mouse for example. Learn real content related to the story, move from that imaginative and fantasy world into the real world and relating it to other school subjects. Link the story as we've seen to authentic authentic children's culture. Review learning.
What can we do now or what do we know now that we didn't know before the story? What have we learned? And most importantly, how have we learned it?
And what helped us to learn most? And finally, consolidate that home school link. Perhaps you could like to make a mini book, a zig-zag book of the story and children can take it home and tell.
the story to their parents and carers. So in this session with you this afternoon we've looked at reasons for using stories, we've looked at a three-stage methodological approach with the plus before, during, after and the plus being the home school link which is so important with this age group and we've looked at examples of practical ideas for each stage based on a specific story in this case an example from the New Tiger materials but which include a story song values communicative practice and content and culture and I think my final message for you today about the magic of story time is that it provides us with a way to engage children's hearts and minds in successful and enjoyable learning. So thank you very much. And if you'd like to send your question now. Thank you very much.
But before I thank you again, yes, we'd love to hear from you. And if you do have any questions regarding the points and issues that Carl has raised now, you can do so in the box that will appear on your screen or send any comments. I wanted to say actually when you mentioned about the Content, knowing the real world content.
one of the viewers actually sent in at the beginning a reference to Cross-curricular links which you mentioned and I think that was really interesting know that lovely. Yeah. Yes, absolutely The stories if you see it as like a topic web with stories in the middle and all these things that they can lead to exactly in a very natural Acquisitional kind of way even though we're working very solidly with exactly language structures exactly, but that they're integrated exactly yes exactly is ask one Gary Cano Camino's is saying I agree with all your comments but she sometimes finds it difficult to find appropriate stories for a pre-primary for younger yeah no I understand that completely I think it is difficult to find appropriate stories because they do need to be short they need to be visually very clear they need to have a very clear repetitive pattern or cumulative pattern to engage children. I have some of my own favourites, picture books, you know, Where's My Mummy, that thing, you know, with the little jackling who is looking for, are you my mummy? No, I'm not your mummy, and so on, but with that very simple pattern.
But I absolutely take take your point about that. But with pictures alone in the course books, even the pictures in there, know that they can be exploited and definitely picture books and even maybe stories for older kids can be adapted as well. Possibly they can be, I think, but I do think there is a special need at pre-primary and I would absolutely agree and in fact it's something that I'm very much working on. Okay.
And let me see, Anna, thanks a lot, Carl. Storytelling is the best way to teach young learners. I'm a favourite, my favourite part of the class, where I can find rhymes for playgrounds. Thank you. Ah, yes, she's saying thank you for the reference to the playground games.
Right, right. And there are lots of examples of playground songs and rhymes and games in my 500 activities book. Yes, which I mentioned at the beginning. Yes. Absolutely, it's a really complete methodology book, which I refer to a lot as well.
Ana Belén Sánchez, I just want to say thanks, Carol. Her experiences and knowledge have helped me a lot today. Oh, I'm so glad. That makes me really happy. And Patricia Palacios says, listen, she refers to cooperative learning activities around the story as well as an opportunity, which is an interesting point.
Well, I think that's a really, really good point to make because... we know that cooperative learning is hugely important in developing those social skills such as empathy and teamwork cooperation and collaboration as well as helping children to improve their performance in English and I think there are lots of ideas for cooperative and collaborative activities based on storytelling I mean just to take an example would be working together together to invent and create a parallel story. So, you know, tiger has a sore paw, but maybe, you know, the giraffe has a sore neck.
Exactly. You know, and they can work together creatively. Exactly. And I think the important thing there is that you need to give the children the scaffolding and support because they know very little language, but they also can be very creative if we give them the opportunity. Absolutely.
The opportunity. Thank you very much. mentioning that. And lots of comments about thank you for your enthusiasm from Maria Clara Camps, thank you Carol very interesting from Dolores, thank you as well.
So lots of really positive comments, thank you for your experience from Idoia. She asked the question do we follow the same three stage model with all ages even in third signs? I think that's a very good question. question I think it's a very very useful model and I think it even works when you're teaching secondary children or even adults for you for us to think about what we're going to do before the story to activate their interest to actually to give them really essential language that they need to know for the story and to activate link it to their schemata to what they already know about world about what the story is going to be about. And then during I think the need for variety, I mean with adults maybe adults are more tolerant of less variety, but I think variety is always a good thing.
And equally, after a story, you want to follow up in the same way. So I think it is a very solid way of working with stories to ensure that we maximise the learning process. Okay, well thank you very much, thank you very much everybody and thank you so much Carol for sharing your experiences and insights and experience because I think you know you've it's been very clear and very systematic and very inspiring to see this model which is very doable.
That's what I hope, doable, that's what we want, things that really work effectively in the classroom and that are not difficult to put in to practice so that's that's the hope and the idea yes it's been lovely to see all your wonderful ideas too so thank you for thank you very much a pleasure so now we're going to take a short break a couple of minutes while we change speakers during this break you will see a short video about Macmillan new courses for 2018 and if you would like more information about these courses you can of course visit our catalogue, our online catalogue at www.macmillan.es forward slash catalogo or contact your local office and request a visit from your local delegate. And I just want to remind you again about the social media competition on Twitter or Facebook. You can post a comment and we will choose 10 winners whom will receive a 175th anniversary Macmillan anniversary.
prize. See you in a couple of minutes.