BLOOM'S TAXONOMY & STORY TELLING

Today, in class, we have continued working with Bloom's Taxonomy and storytelling:

Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification of the different objectives that teachers set for students (learning objectives). There are six different domains: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. We can also divide it in two different cognition levels: lower cognitive questions (remember, understand and apply) or higher cognitive questions(analyze, evaluate and create). Current questions in regular schools are often lower order activities, so our main objective as teachers is to produce higher order activities.

For example, while learning new weather vocabulary: if they do a matching (match the word with the correct picture) they are just remembering; while if they answer questions like: “What's the weather today?”, they are applying. What is more, if you ask them to invent new categories to classify: “windy, warm, foggy, cold...”, they are creating.

In order to practice Bloom's Taxonomy, we did an activity related to it: we watched and listened the story: “The tiger who came to tea” and then, we had to invent two sentences for each category of Bloom's Taxonomy. Then, we had to do the same, but this time we had to based our questions on a fairy tale that we already know and invent five questions for each category. This way, we are learning to differentiate between all the categories and, what is more important, we are learning to create higher level cognitive questions.

Then, we continued with storytelling. Firstly we learnt the difference between read a story and tell a story: while you are telling a story, you use body language, interact with your audience, change your voice, you are redundant...

We also watched and listened the story “Fidgety Fish” and we learnt the parts of a story telling:

1. Call the attention.
2. Set the scene: It is always a good idea to exploit pictures to help the child understand and visualise the story.The stories have illustrations which can be used to introduce the story, elicit vocabulary they know, introduce difficult words in that story, and generally excite the interest of the child for the story. (Teaching Children © BBC | British Council 2007)
3. Tell the story (predicting, interacting, using body language...).
4. Discuss the story afterwards: It is always a good idea to do a quick comprehension check when you have finished the story.

For next lesson, we have to bring a story book and tell the story to our partners in order to practice storytelling. We think that it is a great idea to improve our skills on telling a story.