…celebrating European Day of Languages
Exactly, every year, on the 26th of September, we celebrate European Day of Languages.
There are numerous reasons why that day is so important.
We want to pay attention to literacy, to linguistic abilities, to European language diversity, therefore rich historical, civilizational, and cultural heritage, and, in the end, European unity in that richness.
Teachers always show their creativity in creating activities in their lessons plans, especially when they are motivated to celebrate particularly this day.
So, we want to share with you a motivating, active, creative, enriching and relaxing exercise that has proved every single descriptive adjective in this sentence!
Multiple creative skills in one class
Two subjects, Art and English, together is a perfect idea to boost creativity with your students.
The initial point of this joint class is a creative expression.
Students express their emotions and impressions visually and in written form.
Here you have an activity plan how to do it.
Topic: Blue-colour in nature
Goal: to make students be aware of the importance of recycling paper since blue refers to paper recycling bin by connecting the symbol of colour blue in these contexts
Learning outcomes:
- student suggests ideas connected to blue as the main key word
- student expresses emotions by painting a moment in nature that has blue colour prevailing
- student writes haiku poem with key words from the brainstorming exercise
English activity
First, English teacher starts with brainstorming blue colour as a warm-up activity.
Here you can do it digitally, by using brainstorming apps, such as Answergarden which is really easy to use and share with your students as a link or QR code.
Since this exercise was done with 12-year-old students, there were answers that are completely right but, in this context of nature not applicable, and students do not know at this stage which context they do this brainstorming, what makes this exercise more fun and challenging! So, we had answers as smurf, and jeans. 😄
After that task, now students were asking themselves what next was coming, the English teacher announced the upcoming exercises followed by jolly students’ reaction…a lot of laughing!
Yes, pretty entertaining, yet educational and ultimately enjoyable!
Writing haiku poems!
After given instructions and examples, in a calm atmosphere, where a soothing piece of music was playing, here classical pieces of music are well-fit for this kind of activity, students were creating their haiku poems with the key words from the brainstorming cloud, trying to follow the pattern of 5-7-5, which was not an easy task at all!
They needed to represent a moment in nature in autumn surrounded by the colour blue.
ART activity
When the Art teacher told students what they needed to do with their haiku poems, we reached an excitement point!
Completely, out of blue, only one student had a hunch of a possible upcoming surprise task, this task made students show a massive interest with a lot of questions, which was a proof of getting them really motivated.
Students were really motivated by creating a picture out of their haiku poem!
In aquarelle technique, guided by their Art teacher, they skilfully and successfully made their paintings!
and the smurf wearing jeans is also here:
After 90 minutes of mixed classes, we can conclude that:
- joint classes are most likely to produce a lot of positive learning energy and atmosphere
- Art & Language classes (any language in our opinion!) can be successfully intertwined to motivate students expressing their thoughts and feelings
- Art & Language classes can be widely productive when combined together as much as activities are planned with reachable outcomes
So, there is so much more you can expect from these two creative teachers, created for our Erasmus+ teacher training course: https://linaedu.eu/erasmus-course-art-language/.
Register and book your place to join us on this ultra-creative teacher training course!
Have a nice, lovely autumn and see you in Split, Croatia!
