Walking through the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool recently I saw this composition by Paul Scott “Inspired by Liverpool’s Past”. It gave me such a flavour of the maritime city and its past….. snapshots, emotions, memories, sensations………

I have been thinking of ways that we can link cultural and language based explorations of target language cities, towns, countries, celebrations etcetra with Art and creativity. One of my colleagues in a network school wants to find ways to link language learning to creative curriculum geographical focuses such as South America, rivers, mountains.

This picture gave me an idea!

I like the fact that it is divided up in to a frame and there are compartments and boxes. So here is my idea to create visual presentations of the exploration of a focus mentioned above.

I am concentrating upon the geographical focuses for my examples.

Let’s compartmentalise our investigations

Each child needs an A3 piece of card or a box.

The card or the box needs a minimum of6 compartments. Each compartment will contain ultimately a memento of the investigations and exploration that can be explored by another person and inform that person about the rivers, mountains, South America etcetra!

Each lesson can therefore have a specific focus – so lesson by lesson we can add to our compartments and build the bigger picture- just like you can see in the piece of Art work I shared.

Compartment One :a welcome snap shot

This could be an introductory lesson, looking a relief map of the country or finding target language country, rivers or mountains and then asking the children to create a snap shot pictorial or collection of names impression of what they have explored.

Compartment Two: zooming in!

Take a look at a river, a mountain , a city in the target language country. Explore key terminology and create a labelled diagramor symbols of the mountain, river, or key places in the city

Compartment Three : emotions

Create an emotional story about a visit to a mountain, river, city in the target language country. Explore adjectives, adverbs and verbs using bilingual dictionaries that evoke the smells, sounds, actions, physical exertion and feelings associated with visiting this place. Take time to practise the sound, rhythm and sense of these words when you find them and to put them in to a nonsensical class performance rhyme. Create your own folding out (concertina) alphabetically ordered picture dictionary of these key words you have explored.

Compartment Four: capture an explorer

Create characters- intrepid explorers on the mountain or the river or a traveller visiting the country or city. Create short dialogues where the characters introduce themselves and say what they like and can see and do on the mountain or river or in the city. Write a short message in character and put this in compartment four!

Compartment Five: sentence sensations

Ask the children to write short sentences or phrases that share with everyone else the colours, places, feelings, information they have find really interesting that they have explored during their explorations. Create speech bubbles that contain their sentences and glue these onto compartment five.

Compartment Six: an artist’s impression

Let the children decide how they want to create a pictorial snap shot of what they have learnt and add this as compartment six to their “Creative Composition”!

Now it's time to create your Art Gallery with the Creative Compositions and invite your class and another class to take tome to walk around the gallery and explore the compositions.