Today we’re looking up high. During the pandemic, we have heard quite frequently the phrase “We’re in this together.” The phrase means that we can still stay connected and we can keep our social links through the internet, phone calls, walks at a safe distance from our loved ones, etc. But there’s another way in which we can think about being in this together. We are all guarded by the sky with its sun, moon, stars and clouds.
We are sharing with you an activity sheet which engages learners into a series of mini-activities where they can simply get lost among the clouds. Head in the Clouds is about looking up high and wondering what the clouds might see. Children oftentimes like to get lost in the vastness of the sky and adults may also enjoy re-seeing the sky through the children’s eyes. Feel free to download the sheet and adapt it to your own context.
Passports are powerful documents that say many things about who we are and where we have been. In these times, many of us may have passports but not the option to move around. With limited mobility, we may feel confined to our homes or neighbourhoods. But, there is an alternative! A creative one! We are proposing that you play with a different idea and a different document: a LANGUAGE PASSPORT.
You can design and travel around with the help of your imagination with a language passport. This is a document that language learners can develop over an extended period of time in which they record language stamps: bits of language that they know, capture, pick up from their contexts, etc. As language users, we are the totality of all these language stamps that we live with, hear on a regular basis, or use to reach out to others around us. Language passports are also a creative way to engage with the ones around us, collecting not only our bits of languages, but theirs as well. Be creative and journey around through language(s)!
Storytelling has been important to human beings for thousands of years. Even before the invention of writing, the stories were drawn on the rocks and told by the campfire. Storytelling, in one form or another, can be found on every continent and is enjoyed by children and adults alike. We tell stories about things we love and things we are afraid of, things we know very well and things we have just discovered, and by doing so we make sense of our world.
Stories can be told in many ways, some people like writing novels, others make films or act the stories on stage, others yet – draw comics. Drawing comics can be a combination of everything: you can draw, paint, cut out pictures and words from newspapers and you can write whatever you want. Better yet, you can use any language and any tool you have at hand!
Monika Szydłowska, an artist from Poland, moved to Scotland with just a set of watercolour paint and pencils and created a story about her new life in Scotland. There were many things she found funny or strange in her new life and she documented them. She drew people she met or others she saw on the street and wrote down conversations she heard around her. She used many languages in her comic (and sometimes no languages at all!).
Activities we propose below are inspired by Szydłowska’s work and allow children to create their own comics in which they can tell a story about current times, someone else’s life or an imagined world, whichever they feel like creating.
Over the past few weeks, the influx of information about the coronavirus and the lockdown applied in many countries have taken us through a wide range of emotions. Many people describe this period as a ‘roller coaster’ with a mix of positive and negative feelings. To find a balance and to re-focus our energies on positive feelings, it is important that we begin by acknowledging where we are. We can then begin to shift our attention to feelings that help us cope with the situation.
Our children also experience intense feelings in their households but may not have the language to talk about them or the opportunity to explore these. For this reason, we share with you an activity that helps children explore the language of their feelings by drawing on all the resources they have at hand. Feel free to adapt this activity to your context and remember to encourage language learners to explore their feelings in a safe and comfortable way.
We make sense of ourselves and our environment through concepts such as time or love, which are often abstract and can be quite difficult to express. To talk about such concepts, we often use figurative language, for example, metaphors or idioms, such as time flies, once in a blue Moon or head over heels.
Raining Cats and Dogs
Although idioms exist in all languages, they differ because of our cultural diversity and the fact that languages, despite being interconnected, have evolved along different paths. This can make learning about idioms from different languages a useful and enjoyable way of exploring different cultures.
Idioms can be partially inferred from their underlying image-schematic structure. For example, in être dans la lune (to be in the Moon), someone’s thoughts are conceptualised to be in a separate space from the spatial location of the time of speaking. The idiom I love you to the Moon and back is based on the image of a long distance representing the intensity or extent of a feeling. As these structures are shared by us all, we can often guess the meaning of idioms we have not heard before, even in a different language! Sometimes, though, we also need some knowledge of the culture to understand the meaning of an idiom and that is why it can be difficult to work out the meaning of new idioms.
Idiom activities work well as a stand-alone activities or integrated into other learning activities. We include here one such activity that can be completed and shared at home:
If you are interested to find out more, Creative Multilingualism, a four-year research programme investigating the interconnection between linguistic diversity and creativity, have some multimedia resources on metaphor and idioms:
During these unexpected times brought about by Co-Vid 19, our team will work on and share new ideas for language activities that our primary children can try at home with or without the help of their parents, family or friends and carers.
Our Language Toolkit already provides a wide range of activities that can be adapted for home contexts. However, given the demand for new ideas adapted specifically to the current conditions of lockdown in many places around the globe, we offer in this Blog section of our website a few new ideas to use and trial. We hope our activities serve you well, fill you with joy and creativity.
If you would like to design your own activities on our template, we are sharing here the default Template_Activity_Sheet format so you can populate it with your own ideas. If you develop your own activities, we would love to hear how they worked. Please send and share your ideas with us and we would be happy to post them on the Blog as well. We’re doing our best work when we put our minds together!!!
Today we’re looking up high. During the pandemic, we have heard quite frequently the phrase “We’re in this together.” The phrase means that we can still stay connected and we can keep our social links through the internet, phone calls, walks at a safe distance from our loved ones, etc. But there’s another way in which we can think about being in this together. We are all guarded by the sky with its sun, moon, stars and clouds.
