Museum visits are an excellent way to combine heritage language teaching and art. But what if no interesting museums are nearby? Here, virtual museums are a good alternative. In this workshop we aim to show how freely available online resources published by museums can be used for a wide variety of art-based learning activities.
Reading Yoga is an engaging, movement-based storytelling activity that uses a children’s book to support language development. It is designed to bring together multilingual families in a playful and culturally resonant setting.
This activity encourages preschool children to use familiar language, learn new words, and engage in playful, creative writing exercises using sensory materials, with or without the involvement of their parents. It transforms vocabulary learning into a hands-on, memorable experience that sparks imagination and curiosity.
This playful reading activity helps children explore a story by finding, highlighting, and creatively rewriting key words. Through colors and shapes, they build simple or advanced sentences, making language learning fun and interactive.
Paper cuts are a long-standing tradition of Polish peasant culture. The best-known, from Kurpie and Łowicz, were cut with sheep shears. They range from simple to intricate designs, from single-
colour cuts to collages and illustrated stories and have been used to decorate walls and windows. This makes them a perfect means to combine a creative activity with heritage language learning.
With this game, learners not only improve their vocabulary, avoiding lexical pitfalls while also benefitting from existing knowledge of the majority language. They also playfully gain a better understanding of the historical and cultural ties that link their heritage language to the majority language.
This activity helps participants understand idioms by turning them into creative drawings. While having fun, they learn the meaning behind unusual expressions, explore how language works, and practice using their imagination.
In this method, calligrams (or picture poems) serve as an inspiration for exploring word fields centred on common terms, such as the name of animals. Learners are asked to fill a silhouette with words and phrases related to the image, thereby enriching their vocabulary in the heritage language.
This method integrates movement, music, and language learning through a dynamic game where children dance, freeze on picture cards, and respond to prompts. By identifying features, naming objects, and rhyming, they develop cognitive skills, creativity, and multicultural awareness while staying physically active.