Didactic Ideas

Didactic ideas

The following ideas are mere suggestions on how any school could use these antivirus signs if considered interesting:

Each student can decide a personal gesture that can identify him in front of the others. Every time someone wants to call this student they can make that gesture. If necessary, claiming his attention first without speaking, for example clapping.

Each of these personal gestures can be transformed into a signogram to be written on a piece of paper using the technique explained in these pages.

To practice the incorporation of gestures in the classroom, texts can be written in which certain expressions are replaced by the corresponding signogram. In this way the student makes the corresponding gesture if one of these signs appears when reading the sentence aloud.

Through this exercise you can also check if the rest of the class understands what the student is expressing.

Use of gestures at health-related actions

-Individual students could produce small videos with sentences, sayings or proverbs related to the fight against the disease or with any other health or environmental related issue, making some of the antivirus gestures to illustrate the meaning of the main concepts. These videos can be placed on the social media to show the commitment of the school with the health and well-being of the students and the school community.

-Interested teachers could encourage groups of students to create small stories about situations where the use of antivirus signs can be introduced in social interactions to reduce the spread of the viruses. These stories can be recorded in video with the students playing as actors. Placed in the school website or similar, these stories can serve as examples for the students’ families and the general public on how the use of these gesturers is both possible and beneficial.

-The school as a whole could foster the use of certain gestures for specific situations at the everyday school life. Other Yogote signs that are not part of the antivirus selection can be chosen - if needed - at the online dictionary.

-School collaborations and networks can get involved sharing their experiences and materials. In this way, the fight against this global pandemic would receive an additional contribution from the global educational community.

Apart from these specifically health-related actions, the Yogote international signs can be used at many other educational fields and school levels .

Activities like Worldpoems or Peace Indaba can be used as models to produce and exchange every kind of cultural products between all the varied cultures coexisting in your multicultural country. The fact that these experiences would be based on the use of international signs could facilitate further collaborations with schools from other countries.

Multilingual workshops can lead to interesting activities like the organisation of a Global Market at school to show how the international signs can be profitable for the exchange of goods and merchandises, rising awareness among students about an increasingly interconnected world.

Specific materials could be produced by schools from different indigenous or local language communities. Besides being used at the same school as well as in other schools from this same language background, these materials can be shared with schools in the same country - either from different indigenous communities either mainstream schools - to foster a broader knowledge of the country’s plurilingual heritage, as well as to enhance multicultural awareness in their students.

These materials could be produced and shared using mobile phone apps as was made by schools in Galice and Ireland to exchange knowledge about their respective local languages. The apps for this particular case are explained and can be free downloaded together with some examples of the students’ productions.

The Yogote signs can even be used to promote literacy in any of the mother tongues existing in a certain country, as well as in multilingual classrooms, explained here as a development of a previous and more general proposal in the same sense.