This was my favourite lesson with Taya ❤
I've recently come across this nice book which is written in a good style, easy to read language, so why not read it with your kids or students?
Before I get into details of the lesson plan I would like to tell why it felt like the best lesson for me:
💜 It was rather spontaneous, I did not prepare, I had only looked through the introduction page and I liked it.
💙 And I had it on my holidays' to do list - to tell Taya about some world known artists, to recognise some names and some styles of the world art.
💚 And to get the inspiration to create something ourselves.
💛 And it was a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) - for those who know the terms. For those who do not: the content, the general knowledge of the world, the culture or science is a prior goal, whereas speaking English comes as a special bonus, but not the planned language lesson, just a means of communication.
In my after teaching analysis I will refer to Bloom's Taxonomy, if you don't know what it is, I'll give you the clue - see the picture below.
All lesson activities can fall into 6 categories and every lesson's aim is to reach to the top of the pyramid - to create some work based on the learned material.
Lesson breakdown
Reading
🔹Do you think Pablo Picasso lived a happy life? Why? (he lived a long life, he was very popular and very rich, but also he lived through two World Wars - (teacher's remark: it is not easy to tell if he lived happily or not -it is an open question - and it is Higher Order Thinking Skills, HOTS#5 - Evaluation).
🔹What events did he witness?
(Lower Order Thinking Skills LOTS #1 Remembering - it's good to check how well your memory works, how many words can you call out without looking into the text. And after getting it you can take that step to the HOTS, reflecting, comparing, judging, speculating...)
🔹For how many years had he been working? - Taya knows that eghty years of work did not start at the age of one, which means that the artist had lived even longer, hypothetically for 95 years if he started painting at 15 (LOTS #3: Application)
🔹How many pieces of art did he create? (LOTS #1: Remembering, scanning the text for the answer)
🔹What forms of art were mentioned in the article? (LOTS#1: Remembering and also HOTS #5 evaluating how industrious a person can be)
🔹When did he start selling his drawings?
🔹At what age did he die?
Taya was really amazed by the fact that the symbol of piece 🐦 has it's creator. She said it must be so cool to create a world known symbol!
🔹What are the opposites of these words:
serious - funny, silly, playful...
childlike - adult, grown-up, realistic
colorful - black and white, grey, monochrome, dark
simple - difficult, complicated, complex.
(LOTS # 2: Understanding)
🎨 it's time to have some fun!
Let's try to draw the outlines of a horse without taking your pencill off the paper, think at what point will you start and make a one-line-drawing.
Let's do the same with the scissors!
If it counts as HOTS #6: Creation - then we got it! But I think we just had some fun after lots of reading and discussing. In a language class the creation should be either a piece of writing or a speech (some verbal creation, such as a short report or a summary, maybe rendering). And I guess because it was not a language lesson 😅 but a CLIL lesson, we had it all right!
I hope, you like it too. ❤
