Implementation of “My Hand is my mouth” (SOI-TR-332)

Author: Fatma Merve Yıldırım, English Language Teacher

School/Organization: Çetin Şen Bilim ve Sanat Merkezi

This SOI is based on the learning scenario of “My Ηand is my Μouth” by Eleni Malamidou and it was implemented by Fatma Merve Yıldırım. This LS was chosen to raise awareness to people who have disabilities and the difficulties they face in their daily life.

Lessson 1: Time of Awareness

Step 1: We started with a lip-reading challenge. Students were given a headphone with a loud sound and tried to understand what his/her pair telling. They were asked some questions like “How did you feel?” “Is lip-reading difficult?” or “How can be your life without hearing ability?”

Step 2: Students made a brainstorm about the association of the deafness and watched the first part of the video about daily challenges of deaf people.

Our brainstorming activity

Step 3: We talked about Turkish and British sign language symbols and students had a three-minute challenge to find some words written in British sign language.

Step 4: The students were introduced with Europeana collection, and they did research about famous deaf people from different occupations. We talked about famous deaf people like Beethoven, Helen Keller, Thomas Edison, Evelyn Glennie, Gertrude Ederle.

Lesson 2: Time of Creativity

Step 1: Students created posters or infographics in Canva or Genially (according to their choices) based on their Europeana research.

Step 2: Students discussed what these people achieved despite their disabilities and the importance of hanging on to their dreams. They also talked about the difficulties that deaf people had in the past.

Lesson 3: Time of Empathy Step 1:

Students worked in peers and created some cartoons on Canva with the aim of raising awareness toproblems, misconceptions and stereotypes that deaf or hearing-impaired people experience.

Step 2: Students presented their works, and their friends made some comments about their works. Step 3: The pair of students took part in a Kahoot challenge about the “Deaf Culture and People”. Step 4: The students wrote their reflections about the topic.

A Photo collage from the different activities. (Lip-reading, fingerspelling challenge, creating digital materials and Kahoot challenge)

Evaluation for the Students

Students learned new vocabulary of “Deaf Culture” and revised their ability of talking about past and present, so they improved their language skills. They also improved their collaboration, communication, creativity, and empathy skills via different tasks. They had the chance of expressing their feelings and thoughts in each step and this raised their awareness about the topic. I suggest that integration of formative assessment is crucial to monitor the students, but some students cannot say their ideas easily and filling a simple reflection form can be helpful for teachers to observe whether they reach the learning goals or not.

Conclusion and Feedback

Europeana is a nice digital encylopedia and it gives the chance of researching so many things in different languages. As an English language teacher, I like applying CLIL method into my lessons and whenever I choose a topic related to Social Studies or Cultural Heritage for my students, I search the lesson plans on Teaching with Europeana Blog and get some implementation ideas. While searching for this lesson plan to implement, I also found a lesson plan about the oils in Ancient Egypt and I will use the some ideas of this plan in addition to my own activities.

Did you find this story of implementation interesting? Why don’t you read about the related learning scenario? My Hand is my Mouth created by Eleni Malamidou

Did you find this story of implementation interesting? You might also like: 

• From Disability to Creativity implemented by Eleni Malamidou
• Emotional Intelligence and Teenagers implemented by Athanasia Kakali
• Colour-Blind Women implemented by Lisa Pace

Do you want to discover more stories of implementation? Click here.

Public Domain Mark 1.0: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by the Nationalmuseet Sweden.