Day 4

Today they had two very different activities prepared.

The first one was "Marzuku's bowl". It was a very nice session where students read in pairs. The couples consisted of one pupil with an Italian mother tongue and the other member with a non-Italian mother tongue. We could hear: Urdu, Arabic and English. Reading was done fragment by fragment, first in the “foreign” language and then in Italian. It was a session with a lot of participation, arousing curiosity for hearing an other language.

Simona had prepared the session focused on traditional tales, fables and set phrases. The texts they read revolved around these three elements. It made us realize that classical tales, fables and set phrases are shared literary texts, no matter where they come from, they are a valuable element for sharing and learning language and values. He recommended to us a book of Cinderella that includes versions of different countries where the same story has nuances to fit in its environment, so for example we find that the shoe in Holland is made of wood or in Asia it is made of silk.

Linked to this purpose they continued by doing a contest. They divided the class into two teams. Each team had to produce five questions on classic tales with their answer. After the teams sat on both sides of the room, one member of each team sat in the middle with a chair and a pulsator. The person sitting in the middle was the spokesperson. The team asked the question, and when the opposing team agreed to the answer, the person in the middle would hit the pulsator and say it. The opposing team said whether it was correct or incorrect and if the team did not agree with the answer, they would use a book in the library to discuss over it. We had a great time. The students looked for very stilts answers in order to win. It was very fun.

The second activity of the day was quite different. It took place in the art classroom. A real atelier with a lot of material everywhere. The activity they were doing was Caviardage art, a technique that unites reading, writing and art. The work mixes visual and plastic education with the nearby history of the municipality, obtaining a custom book as a result. If I have to be honest when seeing that mess, I thought that nothing would come of it, but students knew very well how they had to do it and how they wanted to do it. We couldn't see any finished work but we could get an idea.

That afternoon, Raffaela (the art teacher) and Sabrina (the mathematics teacher) took us to Aielli for a walk , a town full of murals on the facades of the houses and where we found an open-air library.