Tales from Villa Adriana
From sources to a collective book, read in public
The workshop takes Villa Adriana as the setting of a collective story. The pupils act as officials and companions of the emperor and report in the first person on episodes connected to his travels and to the places, objects and cultures encountered. The starting point is a set of selected sources, images and information, used to build an invented story with references that remain recognisable in the historical record.
- School level
- Lower secondary school · Primary school
- Age
- 8-13 years old
- Structure
- 12 hours · 6 sessions
The programme
Tell me how it was
2hListening to a descriptive text and drawing it, with a comparison of the versions produced.
How it is made
2hWays of conveying the size of an object to someone who has not observed it.
The test
2hTest of the text on an external reader, without questions and without spoken additions.
Who did you find there
2hObservation of a revision carried out by the trainer and individual revision of one's own text.
What happened to you
2hApplication of a narrative structure of eight sentence openings to the assigned place.
The evening of the banquet
2hFinal draft, composition of the collective work and public presentation.
The outcome
The bound collective work, with the plan of the villa opening it and one place per page, presented by the pupils in a closing event open to external guests.
For the school
- The text is submitted to a reader required to produce a drawing from it, in place of an assessment by an adult: the difference between the author's intention and the reader's reconstruction is the datum from which revision starts.
- Every sentence is formulated orally before being written down, a condition that makes the activity accessible to recently arrived pupils and to those with specific writing difficulties.
- The fixed-length module works as an upper limit: in a group with uneven writing skills, a shared ceiling has a greater levelling effect than any compensatory measure.
Bringing this programme to your school
This page can be shared with the school leadership without sending the whole catalogue. A twenty-minute conversation defines the calendar, the number of sessions and the adjustments the institute’s context requires.