Task 5

Write a book with Tar Heel Reader

In this post we prose a creative writing activity. We have used the online tool Tar Heel Reader to create a short story for students in the first year of ESO. Our story is called Andrew’s daily routine, and it’s about a 10-year-old boy and his habits during a normal day, so we have used a lot of frequency adverbs, Present Simple and vocabulary about habits and routines.

The topics of the curriculum we want to develop with this activity belong to the minimum contents in the curriculum for 1^st of ESO. The grammar and vocabulary topics are specified as follows:

GRAMMAR	VOCABULARY
-          Present simple tense -          Adverbs of frequency	-          Verbs: daily activities and movement activities -          Family -          Hobbies -          Transport -          School -          House -          Animals

• Understand the information of English texts.

• Use basic reading comprehension strategies: identifying the topic of a text using textual and non-textual elements, using previous knowledge, inferring meaning from context, etc.

• Write short texts adequate to their level of knowledge.

• Incorporate the ICT in the learning process.

• Present a positive attitude towards the foreign language.

• Assimilate the use and construction of Present Simple.

• Recognise vocabulary related to the daily routine.

• Identify and learn adverbs of frequency.

• Use the punctuation marks properly.

• Write short texts about daily routine using correctly the present simple tense.

• Express habits and personal likes.

• Show creativity in the writing activity.

According to the curriculum, with our writing activity we try to stablish the following general objectives:

The main aim of the activity is to provide the students an example so they can create their own short story which will be assessed. We also intend students acquire some specific objectives regarding the topic we have chosen:

The assessed task will consist on writing a short story following the example provided. The target language will be English and the topic they have to develop will be daily routine. To assess them, the teacher will consider the grammar correctness, the use of varied vocabulary, the use of the adverbs of frequency, and of course the creativity. Copying literally the teacher’s example or other student’s work will be penalized.  

Here you are the link to my story on Tar Heel Reader.