Description of the activity:

Six students and two teachers from each partner country came together in Braga, Portugal, to produce illustrations for the stories produced in the previous LTT in Romania.

Before coming to this LTT, each partner country was expected to achieve a number of preparation tasks in their country including making a seminar on how to illustrate a children’s books and thus to ensure that the students have prior ideas. The pairs were specified and the stories were distributed to each illustration group.

On the 1st day, a video was shown to the whole group and it served as a stimulator for the creativity of illustrators in this meeting and there was also a visit to a NGO working with the refugees.This increased the communication with the refugees and enabled our students to hear their voice better. After these two activities, the pairs came together to discuss about their illustration style and their previous drafts. On the 2nd, 3rd and 4th day of the meeting, the pairs illustrated the stories. At this point, they were expected to speak English and develop their communication skills in a foreign language and produce a joint product with their peers by negotiating. They were also supposed to integrate the topics they learnt into the Arts curriculum. As peering allows getting response and feedback, which results in better achievement, it helped our students both to build relationships, social interaction and also to produce a better outcome. On the last day, the pairs prepared a presentation on what they have achieved so far and they shared their presentations so that everybody had a chance to see the others' work as well. The aim of this presenting session was to enable the students to see other works and give them a chace to reflect on their own work. They were also given a deadline to upload the illustrations on twinspace. In order to reach these objectives, some topics were integrated into the curriculum of the participating schools including how to draw simple figures and narrative art. Before coming to this LTT, these topics were covered in the Arts lessons. These topics were shared with the other partners in twinspace and during the first LTT by the coordinator. A checklist was prepared to guide other partners during the first meeting, thus they had time to integrate the topics into their curriculum framework.