Welcome to the PLACES Academy

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.