AIMS

The activity aims to develop awareness of linguistic diversity and share it with classmates; to enhance other languages spoken in class; and to place all languages (and consequently, the speakers) involved in the activity on the same level, breaking the hierarchical relationships that can be created in everyday life.

Connections to the curriculum:

- The activity can involve all the languages studied as foreign languages (e.g. English, French, Spanish, ...) in the classroom.

- Links can be made to different school subjects.

How to:

Phase 1:

Children, possibly together with their families, are involved in the collection of linguistic material used for the actual activity.

Children create a collection of multilingual words (see 'The multilingual digital dictionary' → link to the activity already present on the platform), representing all of the languages and dialects known and used by children.

Then they produce a board or a digital document with a grid similar to the one shown below: in each column is a different language, each row includes images (possibly accompanied by the word in Italian). The first column shows the translation of the words in a foreign language studied at school, those following are translations into the other languages spoken by the children in the class.

Words can be organized according to "themes" (eg.. parts of the body, school objects ...) as in the example.

Phase 2:

The cards to play the game are organized in the same way (each column is a different language and each row has an image of the words), but without the translation. The children insert their ships, as in the traditional game, and to hit a ship it is necessary to say a certain word in a certain language.

For example, to hit the blue cell, player A has to say “karandash” and player B has to say whether or not one of their ships has been hit.

The cards can be created using the “table” function in Word or Power Point (or similar programs and / or open source).