Implementation of “What would they say?” (SOI-IT-182)

Learning scenario ‘What would they say?‘, created by Karoliina Mutanen, a primary teacher from Finland, was implemented by Vittoria Volterrani with the 3rd graders of the Primary School of Travo – IC Bobbio during the Covid-19 pandemic. The implementation of cross-curricular learning scenario took 4 online lessons and mainly focused on Art, Language (mother tongue), ICT learning. With this learning scenario, students developed their cooperation, communication, critical thinking, civic competencies, learning to learn, creativity… all fundamental life skills.
Implementation step by step: the process and students’ reactions
Lesson 1:
The initial phase of the implementation helped students refreshing their previous knowledge and connecting it to new contents. The topic “Facial expressions” was already introduced to them during the activities held in March, when we started working on masterpieces that represented different facial expressions.
At the beginning of the implementation, I reintroduced the Europeana Platform that my pupils were already familiar with. They were thrilled to start a new adventure, exploring the Art collections. I decided to let them be the protagonists, choosing the oil paintings they liked and sharing their thoughts about them. Then I explained to them what a Meme is. In order to be sure that everyone understood the aim of the activity, together we explored various collections and, once the filter of reusable content was applied, decided on the most suitable images to be downloaded.
Lesson 2:
At the second stage, all the chosen images were uploaded on a drive folder and shared with everyone to stimulate their creativity at home. In this way, pupils had the chance of examining the images, noticing the different facial/body expressions and writing some short and funny sentences to provide completely different meanings to masterpieces. This guaranteed the originality of their contributions.
Lesson 3:
During the third online session, students shared with their short descriptions of the images and voted for the best ones in the chat.

Lesson 4:
The forth online meeting was dedicated to the creation of the winner memes by using a meme creator tool. After gathering all the memes, I created an ebook using Ourboox and shared it with my students during our next online session and posted it on our class blog. At the end of this online session, we shared some reflections about the process and discussed the main outcomes.

Follow up
For the follow-up activity, students were asked to create other memes at home, using the images found in a second folder. These new memes have been shared on the class blog, on the Art page.
Feedback and impressions
The learning scenario allowed students to reflect on facial/body expressions, examine masterpieces in detail, think divergently, use ICT and have fun. Even though the implementation took us a little longer than expected, it was very effective and meaningful, especially, in times of distance learning. A final metacognitive revision, which was made with the help of some open-ended questions, showed that students really appreciated the scenario and perfectly understood the learning process.
You can find some of our final products by clicking on the following link: MEMES EBOOK (In Italian)

Did you find this story of implementation interesting? Why don’t you read about the related learning scenario?
What would they say? created by Karoliina Mutanen
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Public Domain Mark 1.0: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on European and has been provided by the Slovak National Gallery.