Welcome to the PLACES Academy

The PLACES Academy is a learning toolbox that introduces playful learning and storytelling in teaching and learning. The PLACES Academy has been developed for schoolteachers.
 
The learning toolbox
 has 3 compartments;

In the first compartment, you will find 8 stories that you can use directly in class to motivate thinking, thoughts and reflections among and together with your pupils. The stories are developed with children in mind and relate in both adventurous and everyday ways to the SDGs or the will to work together, which is one of the strongest values behind the European Union.

In the second compartment, you will find tutorials that can inspire you as a teacher to create and tell your own stories. We will introduce you – not to the highway to hell – but to the “Highway to Tell”, which will enlighten how you can use gestures, language, facial expressions and sounds to make stories come alive and engage your pupils – or anyone else you want to tell stories to. You can use these tutorials either to train yourself in storytelling, or you can use them to guide your pupils when they start telling stories themselves.

In the third compartment you will find the PLACES playful learning material that consists of a deck of information and activities cards, assisting you as a teacher to work actively with storytelling and playful learning together with your pupils. The idea behind the playful activity cards is that you can use these cards together with the stories as a way to engage your pupils in a fun and playful way. 

The playful learning material is divided into two parts; one part that is developed for you as a teacher providing teacher guidelines and examples of concrete activities, and how you can develop and implement them. The other part is developed for pupils, where the language has been made accessible to children and where the learning activities have been described as concrete tasks and exercises that can be printed and handed out to pupils.

We invite you to open the compartments one by one to start your journey of learning……

PLACES Stories

Eight stories that can be used in the classroom – or elsewhere – to create dialogue, debate and learning around aspects of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and The European Union.

Tutorials

12 tutorial videos that introduce you to the art of storytelling and how you can tell stories yourself

Playful Learning

A deck of information and activities cards, guidelines and concrete exercises for pupils, that you can use together with the stories as a way to engage your pupils in a fun and playful way. 

The stories in the PLACES ACADEMY were developed by Fortælletid.dk (Denmark), which consists of professional storytellers with extensive experience in storytelling for learning purposes, while the learning material was developed by Design School Kolding’s experts in playful learning. This was done in close collaboration with the Schools for Health in Europe network, Universitá degli studi Milano-Bicocca (Italy), Institouton Ygeias Tou Paidiou (Institute of Child Health, Greece) and Haute Ecole de Namur-Liège-Luxembourg (Belgium) and the South Denmark European Office. The stories have been translated and retold by professional or semi-professional storytellers from Denmark, Belgium, Italy and Greece. De danske historier er fortalt af Kasper Sørensen og Katja Lange.