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...

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...

Hi teachers! Have you ever stopped to think that many times what we see as a mistake can just be a lack of adequacy? What someone told you was wrong may not actually be a mistake. Huh? What do you mean?! Let me try to explain myself. Imagine the following situation: An American child, who has just moved to Portugal and is studying at an international school. He's in a math class and he says, "May I have the eraser, please?" The teacher immediately says: “Eraser no, rubber”. When I saw this scene, I confess that it gave me a knot in the head. The teacher considered the student's speech as an error. He felt the need to correct him and he did. For those who don't know, eraser and rubber mean the same thing in this context, but eraser is the term used in the United States and rubber is the term used in England. So, it is not wrong, but rather inappropriate. This is because at this school, they follow the British curriculum. Now I ask you. How would you have handled th...

 Olá queridos e queridas... Volto das cinzas com uma divulgação importante para mim. Um novo passo na minha carreira, voltando um pouco ao que fiz durante a pandemia. Estou oferecendo novamente o curso Songs For You, mas agora em formato totalmente online.  Se achar que este é seu momento, vem comigo:  sun.eduzz.com/2005518 Se você quer conhecer melhor ou tiver dúvidas, entre em contato: bilingualmusiceducation@gmail.com Você pode também ter uma ideia do que vem no curso ao assistir o webinar  Songs Repertoire Vem comigo!