Art, craft and design activities include creating things such as puppets, masks, comics or advertisements. They can be used in a variety of ways to practise vocabulary and grammar, play interactive games, and act out role plays and stories.

When you decide to do an art, craft and design activity, you need to assess how time-consuming and difficult to manage the activity will be and balance this against the potential benefits for learning. These include developing children's confidence and self-esteem, motivating them to use language for a purpose, and developing their social and thinking skills.

In order to be effective, you need to set up and manage art, craft and design activities carefully. You should prepare the language, establish learning outcomes (see 14), model the process, and monitor activities (both for making the product and for using it).

Children usually get great satisfaction out of making and using art, craft and design activities in order to develop their language skills. By chance, I recently met a young woman I used to teach when she was a child. She told me that one of the things she vividly remembered was making an origami book (see 63) – an anecdote that made me reflect that art, craft and design activities help to make learning memorable too.

My key tips for art, craft and design are:

• 61 Keep it simple!

• 62 Maximise language practice

• 63 Share the delight of home-made books

• 64 Create digital art and design

61 Keep it simple!

The most effective art, craft and design activities require easily available materials and take minimal time to make. This ensures that children can both make the product and use it purposefully in the same lesson.

Two examples of activities, based on nothing more complicated than rectangular strips of card, are:

1 Bookmark: children cut a strip of card (15 x 5 cm). They cut thin strips at one end to make tassels for their bookmark or, alternatively, stick on pieces of coloured wool. Children write a sentence on one or both sides of their bookmark, for example, I like reading about … (bears) or I like reading … (fairy tales). Children illustrate their sentences and decorate their bookmark, using crayons, finger paints and sticky shapes.