Bilingual Teacher Education

When planning, one thing we must think about is where we want to be at the end. Once we know our destination, we can plan how to get there. To plan the journey, we need to understand where we are starting from. You might think I’m talking about planning lessons and teaching our students, right? Actually, no. I’m thinking about you, teachers. If you're not happy with your current job, it's time to make a change. You need to plan for this change. No one should just jump into new adventures without planning. That would be careless. So, let's go back to the beginning and think again. If you find it hard to go to work, if you don’t want to get out of bed to face your boss or that difficult colleague, or if you're tired of using the same workbook again, you should look at what’s wrong. Why is this happening? The first step is to think about where you would like to be. What is the perfect scenario that would make you get out of bed happily and go to work? Write it down, say it...

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 ...

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...