Describing Byzantine mosaic of Justinian

 

Shared by Ana Torrecilla:

This activity is about the Byzantine mosaic of Justinian (c.6th), that is in the church of St. Vitale in Ravenna (Italy). This is the end of the contents about the Byzantine Empire, so the students have already learnt things about its political organization, economy, society, religion and art. These are the steps:

1. We open the presentation "Describing a picture", where I have added a drawing with the necessary prepositions and expressions to say where the elements in a painting or mosaic are situated. After having a look to that drawing (the one with the houses), the students have to describe some of the photos that come after.

2.The image "justinian_mosaic" is projected on the screen and the students have to guess who every character is by observing their clothes and objects. They have to use the expressions they have just learnt: on the right, at the top...... Then, they read aloud what they have written and the image "mosaico1" is shown to check if they have made a good guess or not.

3. The next activities have been added after attending the course "Embellish....", so it has been useful for me. For example, we can practise the conditional sentences by using "If I were the character X, I would......", by assigning a character to each one of the students. If they are more students than characters, they can do it in pairs.

4. Then the students can cover the face of each character with the emoji that represents their expressions best. They can do it as homework, send all the photos to me or upload them on a Padlet and see them in the following class.

5. Finally, I can give them a cloud of words and they have to choose the best ones to describe their facial expressions. For example: serious, happy, expressionless, spellbound, satisfied, angry, concerned, absent, curious, sad, glazed, frightened, grave, majestic, severe, upset, smiley, worried.