This course will provide a hat full of new and inspiring ideas on how English teaching at primary school can be greatly enriched by addressing the young learners’ creative energies and by encouraging them to experience the new language with all of their senses. The two course leaders will introduce the participants to a world of playful language activities that involve spoken word, song, theatre, rhyme, dance and movement. The course will not only equip the participants with plenty of material they will find fun to include in their own classroom, but it will also broaden their language skills and make accessible to them a new, more intuitive approach to the English language.

A main focus of the course will be set on practical hands-on activities and group work. Participants will engage in a range of fun creative writing exercises and poetry games, learn songs and tell stories. There will also be enough time allowed for group discussions about inputs provided in the course and practical difficulties experienced in everyday teaching. Participants are warmly invited to bring along their favourite teaching materials to share them with their colleagues. There will be a book table set up in one of the course rooms.

Materials with the activities, games and exercises presented in the course will be distributed.

Franz Andres Morrissey is a lecturer of linguistics and academic writing skills at the University of Bern. He has a Ph.D. in linguistics on language choice in bilingual education and is an EFL and immersion expert with thirty years of experience both in research and teaching. He is the author of ‘Ready for English’, a course book widely used in Swiss schools at SEK I level.
Franz is also a published poet, writer of children’s books and musician in various folk groups. He teaches highly popular creative writing and poetry workshops for teachers and students at university as well as on a free-lance basis. More recently, he has designed the teaching materials for ‘Creative Ways’, a series of six radio programmes on Literature Teaching developed by the British Council and the BBC World service.
He also runs the creative writing platform www.creative-writing.ch, which gives a good taste of his own and some of his students’ work.

Cheryl Moskowitz was born in Chicago and is now based in London. She holds a creative writing teaching post at the University of Sussex. She has an impressive number of artistic achievements to her name. She has published fiction, poetry and theatre plays, including the critically acclaimed fiction novel ‘Wyoming Trail’ (Granta Books). She has written two screenplays for television and contributed rhyming verse to the ‘Bear Behind’ series for the BBC.
Cheryl has taught an amazing range of workshops in creative-writing, poetry, spoken word, drama and movement for a variety of institutions. Among other projects she has been poet in residence at a Hackney primary school and, with Arts Council funding, conceived ‘Playing with Poetry’, a workshop method for adult/child creative writing partnerships. Having trained in performing arts, Cheryl is also a brilliant performer of poetry and drama, for instance for BBC radio 4’s ‘Talking Poetry’ or on BBC TV’s ‘Storytime’, where she acts as a storyteller.
Currently, she is working on ‘When we’re all grown up’ a collection of poetry for children and ‘Greeting Card Lou’ a novel for children.

For more information contact the British Council Switzerland, Sennweg 2, 3000 Bern 9.
phone: 031/ 560 37 94
e-mail:stefan.wanzenried@britishcouncil.ch

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