The Quality I – KIT

Ideas & Instruments for Intervention

in the Social-Educational Field,
2011
www.ceis.rn.it
11
Inclusive Activities
High Quality School Inclusion Through Multi-Level Activities

Multi-Level or Multi-Entrance Activities are those activities which are introduced to the class as
common project works, and they are carried out through different contributions: big group's, small groups'
and individual's, allowing each child to participate in her/his own way (according to her/his possibilities).

All the children share the same goal, but not all of them have the same capacity or role.

Such activities are truly inclusive activities, involving the whole group but respecting individual
differences: through these activities the teacher (or the educator) can ask each student to give her/his
maximum contribution, the best each one can do.

Multi-Level or Multi-Entrance Activities are, for example:

 editing a school magazine,
 organizing a sports event,
 carrying out a stage play,
 but also more academic tasks like studying and reporting on a particular school subject, or
 a project work like "the Personal History".

In editing the school magazine, for example, editorials and articles are required, but also
crosswords, photos or pictures with captions (much shorter and easier to write than an article), letters,
poems, ads, different style contributions.
A "stage production" needs even more differentiated tasks, from script writing to stage
backgrounds, costume designer, soundtrack music and so on.

An Example: The Personal History Project

In second grade in primary school, studying History means an introduction to History and basic
concepts such as: temporal development, going back to the sources, interpreting documents, making
hypothesis and verifying them etc.
In order to make the children understand and work on historical concepts, the task is
"personalized", that is to say each child reconstructs her/his own personal history starting from the present
and going back up to her/his birth.

It is a long project - lasting the whole school year - which

leads to the making of a thick album, full with texts (recollections,
explanations, interviews to parents and relatives...), documents
(photos, tickets, souvenir), drawings, but also grids with figures and
statistics.
Not only history, but also other school subjects and study
skills are involved: language, maths, geography, art, rhythm and
movement...
1
 Children start from present: with the help from a friend they
realize their own outline in paper, and start
asking themselves the first questions:
 have I always been like this (same size,
weigh, height)?
 if not, what was I like?
 who can I ask to?

In agreement with parents, children

bring to school "documents" of
their infancy: small clothes, toys,
photos... and with these materials
they start comparing and
discussing, making suppositions
and testing their theories.

All their reasoning will

leave a trace in the album (texts,
pictures, grids...) and the materials
will form a sort of a "museum" for
everyone to see.

Reconstructing The Personal History is a typical multi-level activity: all

the children share the same activity, yet the tasks are carefully adapted to every
child's abilities and possibility, so that not one album results the same.

To every child the teacher can ask for the maximum effort; a bright
child who knows how to write long passages will describe accurately a great
experience of the past, the child with difficulties will simply write a caption
underneath a photo, but the meaning of their work is the same and both are
learning historical key-concepts.

With the traditional

teaching there no possibility for real inclusion in mainstream
classes: the bright children get bored with too easy tasks or
the children with difficulties perceive that what is asked from
them is beyond their reach, and give up.

With multi-level activities the challenge is set

individually, and no comparisons are made among children; if
ever, a child is in competition only with herself or himself, as it
should be, because everyone is different.