Ask the students to help you choose three Croatian towns whose residents speak three different dialects. Use Mentimeter to have the students create a word cloud and choose the three most prominent towns. Help the students prepare for the following drama activity by explaining the technique they will be using. A range of drama techniques is available here (the link is to a paper describing how to use drama with young learners in Croatian language classes). You might consider trying out the “Day in the Life of a City” technique. Each student chooses a local radio or television show from the three towns in the beginning of the activity. Have them choose shows which are available on YouTube such as Od subote do subote2/3, Ćo mi ćo ti, Varaždinska televizija, Plava vinkovačka or similar (the links are to television shows from various towns in Croatia). The students note the various features specific to the Croatian dialects spoken in the shows (lexical choices, accents, etc.) in a shared table so these can be compared.

Sit in a circle with the students and ask them to briefly present what they have found out. Then have the students form groups according to their interests. They need to stage a scene to bring the three Croatian towns to life in speech and action. As they prepare for the scene, students will need to consider the plot, the step outline, the characters and their dialogues or monologues, as well as decide how the roles will be divided. As they practise, you can take on the role of a first-time visitor to the town and ask the actors some questions which will help them use what they have discovered about the language and speech of their chosen town. The students will be engaging in the creative transformation of what they have discovered. Have one student in each group film the performance and post it to Flipgrid. When all the groups have added their videos to Flipgrid, the students comment on each other’s performances and suggest improvements regarding (spoken) language.

Activities to support Special Education Needs students

Prepare transcripts of radio and television shows for students with hearing impairments. Visually emphasize the words which are typical of a particular dialect. As other students are researching shows, students with hearing impairments might look for a similar written text available in three different dialects. Make sure that insofar as the creation of a soundscape involves physical movement, it is adapted to the abilities of students with motor impairments. Make sure that you have clearly announced the activity will be taking place to students with autism spectrum disorder and those with intellectual or attention difficulties; also check that these students have understood the instructions. Break the activity up into smaller steps to guide them in their work and write the steps down. If you have students with hypersensitivity to sound, for instance those with autism spectrum disorder, watch out for loud sounds and voices as well as the general level of noise in the classroom as the soundscape is being created.

For students who want to know more

These students end their performance by freezing in place, pretending to be sculptures. Each student should then present an internal monologue, the aim of which is to showcase their experience of learning about local speech and dialects as they were creating the soundscape of their chosen town.

Show the students five images of adolescents. Each image illustrates one of the five basic emotions (happiness, fear, anger, contempt and sadness).

Students describe the images and identify the emotions expressed. They then complete the drag&drop activity in which they match idioms for describing emotions with some of the emotions they have identified in the images. Ask the students to describe specific situations when adolescents may feel these emotions.

Divide the students into groups of three or four and give each group a card with an idiom describing a different emotion. Students should either use an online dictionary (for example, Dictionary.com | Meanings and Definitions of Words at Dictionary.com) to look up the meaning or you could provide the meaning on the card as well. The groups need to imagine and enact a situation which will require them to use the idiom on their cards and express the appropriate emotions. Here are some possible idioms for different groups: to rattle somebody's cage, to be at one's wits end, to be over the moon, to feel under the weather, etc.

Each group member needs to play a specific role and they are not allowed to name the emotion but need to act it out.

As each group enacts their scene, the other groups watch and try to guess the emotions and idioms. The students finish off the activity by completing a quiz on all the idioms, i.e. emotions which they describe. For homework they can use each of the idioms in a sentence.

Activities to support Special Education Needs students

Come up with everyday examples for the five basic emotions which might be familiar to students with Asperger’s syndrome. Use additional questions to guide students as they describe the images in the beginning of the activity (particularly students with attention difficulties). Use examples to explain what an idiom for describing emotions is. Make sure students with learning difficulties can see the translation of the idioms into Croatian, as well as their pronunciation (the words should be spelled phonetically) in order to facilitate acquisition of new vocabulary. Prepare a memory aid, for example a table with the translations, examples and pictorial representations of each idiom. Students whose visual perception is impaired may experience problems with matching items (idioms and their meanings). Provide them with an alternative task in which they need to circle idioms and their meanings with a matching color marker. When dividing students into groups, consider the various abilities and interests of your students and make sure students with special needs are equal and active participants. When students are acting out their scenes pay particular attention to those with Asperger’s syndrome. Their roles should be explained to these students in advance and they should be given short sentences to voice (as and if needed). Roles assigned to students with voice, speech and language disorders should be adapted so that the utterances are short and simple and preference should be given to physical rather than spoken participation.

For students who want to know more

Students who are interested can further develop their scene into a script for an episode of an imaginary series, complete with stage directions. The episode could also be filmed with a mobile phone.

Choose a topic for creative revision with your students. This can be anything you have previously covered: a unit or text from the course book, a unit of grammar that you have previously practiced or any topic your students will find interesting and familiar. Divide the students into groups of three or four according to their musical tastes, for instance, rock, hip hop, jazz, pop, rap, etc. The aim of the activity is to have the students interpret the material you have chosen for revision in terms of the musical genre they have opted for. For instance, if a group has chosen rap, they will need to present the material you are revising in rhyme typical of this musical genre. The groups will be assessing each other’s text construction and performance. Choose a topic for each group, making sure that the topics follow a certain order and form a logical whole.

Agree on the time the students will have available to prepare their interpretations. When they are done, they need to film the performance and add it to a Padlet wall which you have prepared, following the order you have decided on previously. You can add other things to the Padlet wall, for instance questions for the students (to demonstrate that they have understood what they have been listening to) and instructions for peer assessment. To assess the work of their peers students can use subordinate clauses such as “Ich finde Gruppe A super, weil…, Ich finde Gruppe B nicht so gut, weil…, Ich finde, dass...” You can add to the Padlet as needed and use it in subsequent classes.

Activities to support Special Education Needs students

Prepare for revision by presenting the material you wish to revise in the form of a mind map where key terms can be made more prominent and explained in greater detail. The mind map can be used by students with learning difficulties. They can illustrate the map themselves. For example, if students are presenting a grammar rule so that it rhymes, prepare some examples of similar rhymes on a piece of paper. This will serve as a quick reminder for students with learning and attention difficulties, and they will be able to participate in the group work actively and as equals to their peers. Students with hearing impairments should be able to read their rhymes to guide them in delivery, as should students with learning and attention difficulties. Encourage students to read out the words that rhyme in the examples and highlight or circle the last syllables that are the same in both words using matching color markers.

For students who want to know more

Students who are interested can write their own texts which they can then present at school events and publish on the school website. You could organize a rap contest around a given topic: assign tasks for students to complete with the aid of a digital tool like Adobe Spark and award a prize to the winner(s).

Talk with the students about the importance of intonation, tone and pauses when we communicate with others. Ask them how these features are used: do they impact on the meaning that is carried by the content of the message? This activity can be used for revision. Use Quizlet (Flashcards) and prepare a bank of sayings and proverbs that students are familiar with. In Options choose Answer with Croatian, so that the saying or proverb will appear in Latin. Set the mode to Shuffle. Students “draw” their proverbs, taking care not to let other students see what their card says. They need to read the sentence on their card out loud. They will need to be careful to use the correct intonation but instead of the words that are actually on their cards, the students need to use nonsense words. It is very important that all the words retain their morphological features, i.e. if the words are inflected, the students must not change their endings. Students can use gestures and mime for more convincing delivery. The other students need to guess which proverb is being read out loud and when the correct answer is revealed, the class is reminded of the historical context within which the proverb was coined, as well as how it is used today.

You can go first in this guessing game so as to show the students how it is played and what the aim of the activity is. For instance, the proverb Fortes fortuna iuvat can be read out as Krontes paluba stubat or similar. As the proverbs are read out it is very important to observe stress patterns of individual words, so as not to change the meaning of a proverb by using intonation that is not typical. When a student has read out their proverb, the teacher can correct the stress and intonation if these are not accurate, but they should take care not to correct the words the student has chosen to use. In addition to proverbs, you can use famous quotations from Roman literature.

Activities to support Special Education Needs students

Prepare examples of what intonation, tone and pauses mean in communication. The examples should include an audio or video recording of someone speaking. Let the students practice saying an example sentence paying attention to intonation, tone and pauses. Students with voice, speech and language difficulties should choose short and simple sentences (you can suggest some in writing). If the students feel uncomfortable reading aloud, don’t insist on this. Prepare cards with sayings and proverbs in Latin on one side and their Croatian equivalents on the other. Agree with the students on how they will mark intonation, tone and pauses – for instance, they can use a green marker for pauses. This will help to guide students with attention and reading difficulties. Make sure to pair up SEN students with their non-SEN peers; for instance, a non-SEN student reads a sentence out, while a visually impaired student decides on the intonation, the tone and the pause(s) and then repeats the sentence. When they use nonsense words, mark the word endings that mustn’t change in a different color. Students with reading difficulties should receive two words along with the nonsense word (and one of these two should match the nonsense word). They should be instructed to use a color marker to mark letters which appear more than once or to mark whole parts of the nonsense word, which will help them discover what the nonsense word stands for.

For students who want to know more

Students perform short and simple skits to bring the sayings or proverbs to life. Divide the students into groups. Each group “draws” a saying or proverb and has a few minutes to prepare. The groups perform their skits and other students try to guess the proverbs.

Start the activity off with a game of your choice to warm everyone up. Then divide the students into two groups. Tell them they will be playing an improvised game with characters they are free to invent (the only thing they will have no choice about is the situation their characters will find themselves in). They will need to follow a set of previously determined rules to enter and exit the game. Each group is assigned a setting: for example, a youth club, a fast food restaurant at lunchtime, a tourist resort, a wealthy neighbourhood, heroes in paradise or similar. You could also suggest particular dramatic situations: two rebel youths barge into the club and try to stage a takeover, there is a virus spreading through the tourist resort and quarantine has been set, there is a jewellery thief in the wealthy neighbourhood, and similar. Group members are then free to invent their characters and plan what they are like, as well as decide on the relationships between the various characters in their group and on the scene design. Once they have agreed on the details, each group member introduces their character, stating their name and role. Point out to the students that it is useful to populate the game with characters that have a range of attitudes towards loyalty and considerate conduct among colleagues – this will facilitate the creation of emotional plot twists. Explain that the drama game needs to have a convincing ending and that it is up to the last three characters to invent it.

The game has a series of rules students need to be told in advance. Only three characters can be in a scene at the same time and as a character exits the scene they must unobtrusively tap someone else on the shoulder, which is a signal that a new character can enter the scene (they don’t need to do so right away). Each character can enter the scene twice. After the second exit, the student joins the audience so as not to be tapped on shoulder and chosen again.

When the first group finishes the game, the actors retell the plot and the audience gives the actors advice, comments on the game and analyses the relationships between the characters. Then the second group plays the game, observing the same rules. When the second group is done, have the students analyse their performance as with the first group.

Each group then chooses the appropriate music for their story, for which they can use Free Music Archive. The students mime their play to music and each group takes a turn to perform their dramatic situations. Film both games with a mobile phone or a camera. The recordings can be edited in Adobe Spark and posted on the school website to show others what the drama group has been up to.