Bilingual Teacher Education

  Hello teacher, Some time ago, I was thinking about the learning process and how we take a long time to process and memorise new content. Actually, I would not consider it memorise, but consolidate. Did you know that our temporal lobe is the one responsible to process our memory and also language? Humans possess this ability to process the world through language. We have two specialised areas in the brain designed (or evolved) to process language, Broca’ and Wernicke’s areas. Some studies will say that Broca’s area is also key to processing music. Débora! Stop using all of this theory and get back to what is important. Why do I take so long to learn new songs to use with my students? First of all, if you are a bilingual teacher, working in Brazil, how many of you actually studied in a bilingual/international school? How many were brought up in English and had the privilege to have someone singing for/with you in English? So just take some pressure from you right now. Secondly, whe...

I don’t sing this song anymore with my students…. “Ring Around the Rosie” is a really cute song and my very young learners loved to sing and dance to it. It was my favourite song to sing with toddlers after a movement song or dancing moment of my lesson, so they could just go back to the circle without me asking them or telling them to go to the circle again. Now let me tell you why I stopped singing it. "Ring Around the Rosie" might sound like a cute kids' song, but believe it or not, it's tied to something pretty grim - the Great Plague in 17th century London. If you don’t know the lyrics, they go like this: "Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down." Seems innocent, right? Well, it's said to hide some dark stuff. "Ring around the rosie" might refer to the red rashes that people got from the plague. "Pocket full of posies" could mean carrying flowers or herbs because folks believed they could ke...