Free Mini Workshop: An Introduction to Drawing as a Tool for the Language Classroom
ELT Activities
I've written this free mini workshop for English language teachers in response to my experiences running artists in schools projects and working with visual arts, community and English language learning. Drawing is a way of creating your own content and visual material for the English language classroom and a springboard for teaching English around the experiences and expression that students bring to the activity. In this workshop, I look at how drawing can be used as an ELT activity in the language classroom, not only for Young Learners, but for all ages, as a way to:
- focus attention
- initiate a communicative activity
- expand and deepen ideas and reactions to content through the creation of one's own
- give extra tools for expression in the language classroom
I developed this online workshop after I gave face-to-face workshops to teachers in Athens, Greece at the Image Conference 2018. in Liverpool at the IATEFL annual conference and at the Image Conference in Brussels in 2019. If you haven't managed to catch me at a conference or teacher development day, get a sneak peak at the kinds of things she's talking about in this free online resource for English language teachers.
In this mini workshop, we’ll look at:
- drawing – what’s good about it but also what makes it so difficult.
- how our brain works with drawing and the effects of schema and peers.
- some warm up activities that you can use in the classroom to use drawing in a way that supports less confident drawers
- a case study of how I would combine getting my learners drawing and expressing personal ideas and how it can connect with storytelling and exploiting illustration as text
