This activity brought together students' artwork about nature, school, family and society.
Age group: 6 - 18
Celebrate Europe, its peoples and cultures through colours and shapes! We invite children to highlight their communities by choosing a topic and making artwork. The community element is important. Pupils should illustrate a topic as part of a whole: their home as part of the city, their school as part of the community, their region as part of the whole country.
Suggested topics: Home, sweet home; Caring for our lives; Being young in Europe; My favourite place; Europe, my country; Famous person in my society. Other topics are welcome and pupils will probably create more than we can imagine!
Outcomes: artwork
Authors: This activity could be organised by teachers of Arts in collaboration with other colleagues, teachers of Civics, Geography, History, Music, and Literature/Language. We recommend to adapt the activity to fit into the curriculum. Teachers, together with pupils, select several pieces of art from each classroom and then organise pupils' teams to scan and publish them on our site. Individual contributions are also welcome.
How to organise the activity?
Discuss the local community, national and European identity
Ask students to choose a topic and make a drawing on A4 paper for easy scanning. Any medium of art is welcome - oil, crayon, collage, pastels etc
Select the best pieces of art
Scan the artwork and upload the images to our site
A title in your native language is required, with a translation in one of the following languages, if possible: English/French/German
All images must be either in gif or jpg format
Size no more than width 600 pixels, height 400 pixels
Pedagogical value
The main pedagogical value of Painting Europe is to break down language barriers, using colour and shapes as tools of expression and communication. Pupils learn to highlight local features and link them to Europe. They experience the expansion of their work from the desk to the continent. The activity gives participants a deeper understanding of themselves, their families and their communities, by viewing significant events and places through their own eyes.
During the artwork selection teachers are invited to develop critical analysis skills to judge, interpret, compare and evaluate styles, themes, shapes and content.Share with us your pupils' vision of Europe! Young European will realise that each of their touches of red, blue, green or yellow will make a big multicoloured painting of our European continent.
