IT'S CHRISTMAS TIME!!!

It seems like it never arrives, but now it's here... welcome to us Winter!

Merry Christmas for all of you!

Activities about 'AULAS FELICES'

'AULAS FELICES' is an educative programme based on postive psicology and leat to primary and asecondary students. It is for free and it provides resources to work on every field. 

"AULAS FELICES” es un programa educativo basado en la Psicología Positiva y dirigido a alumnos de Educación Infantil, Primaria y Secundaria. Es gratis y de libre difusión. Pretende aportar recursos para trabajar en las áreas y también en tutoría, potenciando las Competencias Básicas más transversales, así como la Acción Tutorial y la Educación en Valores. Su estructura puede resumirse así:

Below you can see the three activities I like the most from Aulas Felices. These three activities would be chosen if I had to put in practice some activities like those in class. I think they are really interesting and work perfectly with the creativitiy and capacity of the students. 

BREATHING AT THE BEGINING OF THE CLASS: 

When I was a child and I went to primary school, my teacher used to use this technique. Relaxing students is very postive because the focus on their breathing and it makes them to concentrate themselves and then, they work more concentrated. If we can use this technique in secondary school, we can mix it with the zen technique. Then, we can tell a story while they are breathing in and out as a way to clean their minds and just think in what the teacher is talking about. 

CORNERS OF CREATIVITY:

What is this, exactly? We try to motivate our students but they already have their own motivations, so we must let them to show their own motivations. So for me, creating corners in the class let students to be more creative, because their imagination can be widespread and interesting for us to know which are their skills and hobbies. 

TASTING THE HAPPINESS OF LIFE: 

I find this activity very cuddly. Because we should reinforce the human aspects of the education and implement activities with this kind of objectives. Even as teachers we make mistakes a lot of times, and most times we are more worried about the content than the form. We just focus on the academic skills and we forget about the human skills, which are even more important than the academic aspects. 

MOTIVATIONAL GRAPH

When we are teaching, the students do not have the same level of motivation and attention during the whole class, and through the graphic we have below, we can differentiate 3 levels. 

The first one is at the beggining of the class, here the learning curve starts to peak because the motivation process starts to be achieved. So this is the moment when we can catch the attention of our students. 

The second level is in the middle of the lesson, here they are like: "Teach us more please! We want to learn everything now!"

And finally, the third level is the end of the class, when the students are focused on when the class is going to finish are their learning here is inefficient and even harmful for them. Motivation now is gone. 

MOTIVATIONAL STRATEGIES

There is a common belief to think that teacher do everything perfect, we are the authority so we have how to teach without any need of innovation or change. But we as a teachers are aware that we have to be always learning, I mean, if we do not want to fail, we have to improve our techniques daily. We are not going to teach in the same way our teacher taught us when we went to the high school, because the time pass by and we have to motivate our students and motivate ourselves. 

It's really hard for a teacher who is 30 years working in a high school to make their students become motivated, because it's a long time and s/he has to innovate a lot in order to make their students think about their education. 

For me, the motivation is extremely important, but not just for students, for loving what they are studying, it is also important for teachers, because if a teacher is not motivated in what s/he is doing, s/he cannot transmit the motivation to their students, so h/se will be (instead of motivating) so boring. It is like a loop in which everything is linked by. 

Here you have a link to test your strategies to motivate your students:

http://www.zoltandornyei.co.uk/uploads/motivational-strategies-english.pdf