A Short Introductory Audio Presentation on Scrapbooking

A 7 minute Movie I Made of my APAC 2010 Presentation

I just came across this very rough 7 minute powerpoint presentation converted into a movie I made when I gave my first presentation at APAC, (The Association of English Teachers in Catalunya http://www.apac.es/ ) on the scrapbooking work I have been doing for the past 15 years with my students. I have given a second presentation this past Feb. 2013 which I will also post later this summer.

By the way, if you are an English teacher living in Catalunya, I highly recommend becoming a member and attending the annual ELT conference at the end of February in Barcelona. They do great stuff and organize one of the best ELT conferences in Spain!!!

If you are new to scrapbooking in the ELT classroom, you might want to see this short little movie.  If you enjoy it or find it useful, or if you have any question or would like more information, please don´t hesitate to leave a comment and I will get back to you!

Here is the video clip from my you tube channel as well:

Scrapbooking Presentation APAC 2010, Barcelona Spain

Happy scrapbooking,



Theresa

OECD educationtoday: Creativity in schools: what countries do (or could...

The importance of creating spaces and opportunities for the development of creativity was the focus of a recent OECD workshop on Education in Singapore.  The workshop highlighted the importance of making creativity an important part of our learning objectives and offered rubrics for corresponding assessment initiatives.  For the complete blog entry, visit  OECD educationtoday: Creativity in schools: what countries do (or could... (by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin Senior Analyst and Project Leader, Directorate for Education).

Scrapbooking with students is an effective, student-centered way to create learning habits that reinforce creativity and the skills related to being creative.  In my next post, I´ll include examples of students´ scrapbooking activities that give importance to creative expression.

Scrapbook Survey

This is a short, 3- question survey for my university students at the University of Barcelona (Introduction to ELT Methodology). Take a minute to answer the questions. I will send you a report with the results of the survey and provide you with a special gift for participating. Be sure and send me an email telling me that you have participated in the survey, so that I can send you the special gift.
This is my email address: tezanatta@gmail.com

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

What scrapbook pages look like!

This past summer I offered two courses based on my scrapbooking experiences, one in Barcelona and one in Tarragona. The courses were about how to use scrapbooks in the preschool and primary English classrooms. Here are two photos of some of the scrapbook pages the teachers made with Pippa Miekle and Hannah Smokum during the course I developed.



During the course, we brainstormed and discussed classroom language we would like to use in English. This was our "Classroom Language" page in our scrapbooks!



During the course we made framers. Framers are wonderful, student-made, student-centered, learning tools that help students with literacy development. The day after we made the framers and experimented with many different ways of using them in the class, we made this "Who? What? Where? Why? and What? page to help us review what we remembered about framers!

Teachers in both courses were very happy with these pages and the scrapbooks they had made!

Scrapbooking began as a means of preserving personal and family history through the collection of stories, photos and memorabilia. It is thought to have begun in the 15th century after the invention of the printing press.

The first scrapbooks were called commonplace books or "commonplaces". These were essentially books which contained all kinds of collected information about a certain topic or theme. Following commonplaces came "friendship albums" . These albums appeared in the 16th century and were collections of signatures, quotes, stories and drawings by friends, personal acquaintances and patrons. Often they were created during trips and included the calling cards and descriptions of visits with people who were met along the way. Many includedlove letters or poems in them as well.

Mark Twain, the famous American author and publisher of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, created, published and sold the very first scrapbooks with pre-pasted pages. Mark Twain loved making and keeping scrapbooks! As an avid traveller and speaker, he filled his scrapbooks with souvenirs, memorabilia and articles from the places he visited. He often became annoyed with having to find glue, so he invented a way of "printing thin strips of glue" on paper. In 1872 he patented his "self-pasting" scrapbook and by 1901 there were more than 50 different kinds of scrapbooks available. All you had to do was add some water to the back of what you wanted to paste in the album and it ingeniously stuck to the pre-pasted page. See

www.pbs.org/marktwain/scrapbook/index

for an on-line interactive scrapbook produced by pbs that talks about Mark Twain´s life and his scrapbook invention.

Scrapbooks passed through another very important development stage with the invention of photography in the 19th century and the affordable availability of the Kodak Brownie camera at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now it was possible to include photos in the most personal of albums.

But it was the the World Conference in Record Keeping, in Utah in 1980, where modern scrapbooking was born! Marielen Christiansen, a speaker, brought and displayed 50 family scrapbooks that she had designed and created over the previous years. At that time, a new product called "sheet protectors" was available. Marielen inserted her family memory pages into these sheet protectors and then placed these sheets inside three ring binders.

She revolutionized the Fair. Based on the success of that presentation, she and her husband published a very helpful book called The Making of a Scrapbook. That was the official birth of the scrapbooking industry in the United States and the rebirth of a 5 century-long tradition of memory-making. Marielen and her husband AJ went on to create the company, Keeping Memories Alive. Following this, they launched the first scrapbooking catalogue and on line web-store.

Since then, scrapbooks and the making of scrapbooks have developed into a billion dollar industry around the world. If you search in Google you will find thousands of sites. The art and hobby of scrapbooking has recently arrived in Spain. You are now able to find materials, websites in Spanish and Catalan, and even stores where you can purchase materials and get lots of ideas on how to scrapbook!

If you would like to learn more about Marielen Christianson and her pioneering work with scrapbooks, see

www.scrapbooks.com/history.php

The Big Sentence Searches Give Away!

I´m giving away 3 complete sets of Sentence Searches!

One set includes 6 books of English language learning puzzles for children and 3 puzzle books for adults.

Sentence Searches are a fun and innovative way of improving English vocabulary and learning how to construct sentences.

Sentence Searches are now available to buy online at:

http://www.canadianinstitute.eu/es/publications/compras.html

http://www.ebay.es

Just look up: Sentence Searches.

You can win a complete set if you enter this competition. All you have to do is answer the following question, in 50 words or less, and the best 3 answers will receive a pack of Sentence Searches, absolutely free!

What is your biggest challenge in the classroom?

Submit your answer as a comment to this blog or email it to info@theresazanatta.com