Reaching out with Creative Arts

Want to make more (or better) use of drama, comics, story-telling and musical activities in your classroom? Join Anna Pires, Rossie Stone of Dekko Comics, Jane Maria Harding da Rosa and Anette Igel as they show you some great practical ideas that you could use with your learners.

Dramatic Moments – Anette Igel
Acting out, miming in the classroom as a holistic approach to language learning. Not everyone might feel like the best actor ever, but just a little bit physical and affective engagement in the learning process help learners to remember and retain language better. The activities in the workshop are based on improvisation theatre and miming but don’t put learners into a place or situation they might feel exposed as they are mainly pair, small group or whole class activities.

Using Stories to Build Connections – Anna Pires
“Everything’s a story – you are a story – I am a story.” Frances Hodgson Burnette We use stories to find aspects of ourselves in others, and aspects of others in ourselves. Stories connect us. But where do we find these stories? In pictures books, novels, films… But in fact, if we look closely, they are all around us. In this practical session, we’re going to look at a variety of different stories and some creative ways of using them with our learners to increase empathy, build a strong classroom community and encourage our learners to look at the world around them with other eyes.

Using comics to educate a wider audience – Rossie Stone
Rossie Stone from Dekko Comics will talk about his own struggles with dyslexia at school and how he developed the technique that would become the Dekko method. He’ll then show some examples of how to adapt entertainment into education. Finally, those participating will be encouraged to find their own way of adapting something they enjoy and making it educational. This can be anything from a game, a poem, a poster etc. The key factor is that it should be fun.

Sing, chant and rap to motivate and thrill, Keep those earworms going, and don’t sit still – Jane Maria Harding da Rosa
There is a lot of positivity and reasons to include songs in the classroom, but there is also a lot more to songs than just singing the ones in the course books. This session will help you explore the beat of the English language and use it in almost every area of your teaching. You will discover that you don’t need a good singing voice to bring musical creativity into the classroom, and with a few tricks and a couple of magic formulas you, and your learners, will be motivated and united in creating your own class anthems.

The full programm can be downloaded (pdf)

Register here until Sunday 11th November. (After that, register and pay on the door.)