Webinar #5 – Arts and Crafts

 

Webinar #6 – Arts and Crafts

A few weeks ago, GPTE students were able to attend another Webinar with the special guest - Kasia Biernat. The main topic of this workshop was to learn about Arts and Crafts in our ESL lessons. The speaker gave us practical tips as well as some inspirational activities. 
There are many benefits of using arts and crafts in our lessons, especially since young children love being creative and expressing themselves, she mentioned that art can be … 

• use as an activity for natural stimulus for communication, 
  
• create as a follow-up activity for a number of topics, 
• provides relaxation, 
• with younger children – it improves their motor skills, 
• provides conditions for peripheral learning, 
• boost student-teacher interaction,

Thus, the implementation of art and crafts in the classroom may reap many benefits when done correctly. The speaker also provided some possible activities. She mentioned that she gets inspired by the different seasons in a year, holidays such as Christmas, Easter and earth day, books, songs, stories, famous peoples/ role models. 

Two of her mentioned activities really stuck out to me – I enjoyed the Respiratory system in a bottle – talking about the system, the different parts and how it works. This is a great craft to do with students as to help them understand the system in a 3-D way.  

The second activity was the art and craft that can change the world for the better: local initiative. More specifically, learners are to collect old, unused fabric from home and repurpose them into something more useful. In this case, the fabrics were sowed together in order to create toys for homeless dogs. This activity is great to teach a valuable lesson (morals), such as being empathic, being resourceful and even helping others feels good. It could be a fun activity to have the students as a class, to physically go donate the toys and have a personal experience giving to the community.  

Finally, I liked that she mentioned that there are many shades of art, and the possibilities are limitless. There are so many ways to include art in our lessons, and students will greatly benefit from them. 

Let me know your thoughts in the comment section! 

Sara