Aulas Felices - 3 activities for strategic investment & to lower anxiety in classroom

This post offers some proposals extracted from the book Aulas Felices. I thought these would be ideal to enhance students’ motivation in class while at the same time they will be learning since they will be so interested and focused in the activities that they will be unconsciously acquiring new knowledge.

1. Creativity: originality and ingenuity

I viewed this as a great proposal offered by the book Aulas Felices, since it is a workshop that is suitable for all ages though we will focus primarily on secondary students.

The objectives of this workshop are to promote the creative capacities of students and to promote the interdisciplinary and collaborative work between the teachers.

How would we carry out such workshop?

The aim of this activity is to establish a time in which students will be able to delve into their creative development, dealing with it from the largest number of possible areas. It is important to mention that this activities will not only be related with art but instead, it will take place thanks to the collaborative work between teachers of all subjects or departments.

A good idea to carrying out this workshop would be to devote several days to working several creative activities integrated in the Cultural days carried out by most schools.

The activities that can be integrated in a workshop taking place at the Cultural Days can be related with many different areas of the curriculum. Here we can see several proposals:

·       Students could carry activities that involve writing compositions such as narrations or poems (Language & Literature)

·       Compose songs, musical instruments of their own invention with recycled materials, or perform a small concert combining different instruments (Music)

·       Invent choreographies or carrying out a performance of a theatre play (Physical Education)

·       Design new inventions such as machines or devices that contribute in society in order to solve an environmental problem (Education Content Area of Science)

·       Plan a performance of activities that combine maths with magic (Maths)

·       Paint drawings on a canvas in which every students includes their personal version of a renowned piece of art (Art and Visual Education)

What about the time?

We could devote two to five days to the Cultural Days and around two hours a day during school to an activity related to this workshop.

Any observations?

In order to help students to think about proposals they would like to follow or to come up with ideas, teachers could devote some sessions at the end of the class to the elaboration of creative proposals from the students prior to the Cultural Days. After this, they could make a presentation of these in the form of expositions or performances.

2. Advertising

This activity will essentially be for secondary students. The objectives of this activity is for students to analyse adverts in a critical way and to develop creative strategies to elaborate adverts in a positive way.  

How will we develop the activity?

Well, it is clear that advertising is a present topic in many subjects found in the curriculum so we can take advantage of this situation and introduce this activity from any of the subjects studied at school asking student to approach the topic form a critical analysis of means of communication.

In order to carry out this activity we will ask students to select and bring to class example of advertisements with negative connotations. Some of these may serve as examples:

·       They could bring adverts with sexist contents or that use the image of women as a strategy for seduction.

·       Advertisements that don’t take into account caring for the environment.

·       Advertisements of items made by exploiting people from underdeveloped countries or by using child labour.

·       Adverts that promote the use or the consumption of unhealthy products such as cigarettes or alcohol.

They should analyse the characteristics of these advertisements. So, they should consider the language used, the images and sounds that follow the adverts and their purpose. After having done this deep analysis, the creative activity would consist in designing, for each advert, a positive copy of the same that, by introducing modifications in the text, images and sounds is able to offer a different message to the audience. Instead, the purpose of these advertisements will be to promote positive actions or attitudes. For instance, they will offer an equal image of women and men, it will denounce the current situation in which thousands of workers live in underdeveloped countries, etc.

The final result can be presented in supports that teachers will be able to decide depending on what they would like to work in the classroom: texts with images on paper, audio-visual montages on PowerPoint or on video, a radio recording and whatever you can think of!

What materials are needed?

Advertisements compiled by students and teachers from newspapers, magazines, radio or television recordings, billboard pictures, internet…

Observations?

This activity is ideal for students to work in groups where they can all come up and offer many different and creative ideas. In addition, it can also serve to develop their open-mindedness thanks to the critical thinking skills that are developed.

3. Invention Workshop

This activity can be carried out with any level of students since its main aim is to stimulate creative thinking.

How will it be carried out?

A problematic situation will be set out to students and a solution to this problem will have to be suggested, in the form of an idea, a tool or a machine, basically, in the most original way they can think of. In order to favour creativity, we will ask students to try to come up with new and fun proposals by looking for new uses of applications for tools and daily objects. For instance, some examples could be a “mop-trainer” to clean the floor while walking or some “binocular glasses” to observe far away animals.

What materials would be needed?

Well, the necessary one in order to create their inventions.

These three proposals will surely be really interesting to carry out with students to encourage both their motivation for the subjects studied in class and their creativity!!

Bibliography

R. Arguís, A. P. Bolsas, S. Hernández, M. Salvador,. Aulas Felices, Psicología positiva aplicada a la educación. 2010.