Aulas Felices

Programa "Aulas Felices"

Psicología Positiva aplicada a la educación

Equipo SATI, 2010

I highly recommend this book. These are the three activities I have chosen, but all of them are very useful:

1 Inventing Sports

Objectives: stimulate creativity and team work.

Development: students are divided in several groups. First each group invents a sport either basing on an existing one (introducing variations) or a completely new one. After deciding the sport, they write the rules. The sports must be playable in the real world because they will put them into practice in the Physical Education subject.

I think this would be a great activity because students are creating something that has real application. They will realise they are doing something useful, and at the same time, they are developing creativity. Furthermore, it is a good opportunity to work with another department.

2 The painting (I would title it “The Hidden Painting”)

Objectives: to develop imagination on visual stimuli; open their minds and realise that first impressions are not always true.

Development: We choose a figurative painting. At the beginning students only see a small fragment. They have to say what they see and formulate hypotheses on what they think the painting represents. Then we show another fragment and ask again. When they have more information, they change their point of view. They go constructing the narration with their perceptions and opinions of classmates. And finally we show the whole image. Then, students can have the general picture and may be surprised of the real story.

An example of painting can be: “The Dominion of Light”, René Magritte, 1954

3 Learning to plan my tasks

Objectives: practice determination; learn to create a planning for the tasks and acquire learning autonomy.

Development: Students design a working plan that helps them organise the individual tasks they have to do during the class and at home. When they are going to carry out a task, they have to fill in a table following these instructions:

Working plan	Control	Final evaluation
-Brief list of the tasks I’m going to do, specifying the approximate time for each one. -Arrange them for example, starting from the task requiring more attention, leaving the ones requiring less effort or being more motivating for the last.	-I reflect on what I’m doing: Am I concentrated? Am I making the most of my time? Am I making progress? -If the task is quite tedious, I make a pause (I walk, I open the window and have fresh air…), and think on the tasks still left.	-When I finish, I value the degree of fulfilment, and my distribution of time.

At the end of the week, the teacher opens a general discussion to listen to the students’ results and reflections on their week work, and picks the students’ charts.