The activity involves the use of photography and it requires students to take pictures outside of school.

Aims

• Practicing and strengthening students’ (especially SLLs’) ability to describe a picture
  
• Teaching pupils the correct use of prepositions of place (such as: on, above, under, behind, and so on)
  
• Enabling children to share with classmates and teachers what their life outside of school is like
  

Links to curriculum: 

Literacy in the languages of instruction

Procedure

The teacher asks the pupils to take some pictures that should illustrate their life outside of school (it could be their homework). They can take pictures of: their bedroom or another room in their house, the park, a shop, the football pitch, etc. Children then need to choose one to describe and upload it to the VLE.

Younger students, who have not yet learnt to read and write, have to record themselves on the VLE while describing the picture, while older pupils, who can already read and write, have to type in the description on the VLE.

Before carrying out this activity, it is important that children are taught how to correctly use prepositions of place in order for them to practice their use when describing the photo.

The process can be repeated more than once in order to describe multiple photos.

Possible further development:

Students can describe their picture in another language. In order to do this, they should be helped by their parents who also speak that language.

These pictures and descriptions could become part of the pupils’ personal VLE page as a way to introduce themselves to classmates and teachers and to show them what their life outside of school is like.

The pictures could be used for another activity, aimed at practicing word fluency: the teacher chooses one of the students’ pictures and shows it to his/her pupils. The latter have 2 minutes to look at the picture and write down the names of the objects/things they can see in the photo. The activity can be made more difficult by asking children to only write down the names of objects beginning with a specific letter.

Materials and digital tools:

Photos, descriptions and recordings should be added to a Forum