Bilingual Teacher Education

Hello teacher Today I'm going to talk a little about my experience and I'm going to point out how I work with composition with children and a little of the work process. So here we go! I work as a music teacher since 2001, initially as a cello teacher and then with children's musicalization. I studied music at USP and started working in bilingual schools. Then I started researching music education and bilingualism and my interest in acquiring and learning languages ​​and music started to get very strong. In 2011 I defended my master's degree and it's research was based on my experience as a music educator in a bilingual context and the research idea was to point out how the students' musical, linguistic and cultural identity was evidenced in their musical compositions. I presented examples of some of the activities I carried out with my students and included more than 60 examples of compositions, basically songs, and the idea of ​​this blog is to present these ...

Dear teacher You are probably back in the classroom a few days now and I bet you already thought that you need ideas to make your students more engaged in the lessons, that they don’t focus when you are giving them the instructions, that they are not learning the content you are sharing with them, etc. I am not going to promise you a magic trick that will make them do all that, but what I can do is help you understand how to change some things about your routine in the classroom and as a result, those things will most likely cease to happen. As Eric Jensen, Ph.D. says, “Using music is an excellent way to influence or change the states of your students, to help with those transitions, or bring them back from a break and let them know it is time to start something new.” When I moved from music teacher to classroom teacher, one thing that I struggled a lot with was to have my students transitioning between tasks without having to tell them a hundred times what to do and where to go. As I ...

Today, the post is dedicated to a series of activities I did with my 1st graders with cumulative songs. Initially, we played a series of games and sang cumulative songs, such as: My Hand on My Head, Tooty Taa, Green Grass Grows All Around, Old MacDonald Had a Farm, Today is Monday... After understanding how this structure works, with a verse that is repeated and then adding other parts, the students had to choose a theme and make an original composition. They could work in small groups, pairs or individually. During classes, students received feedback to ensure that the basic structure was being followed. They could do it in Portuguese or English, or bilingual if they could make sense of them, and they could use the resources available to help with vocabulary and ideas. Once ready, the students had to perform the composition, which was recorded, and made the necessary adjustments. With the recordings finished, we shared the results between the classes. What impressed me the most in...