Bilingual Teacher Education

  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....

  Today I have learnt that if I want I can be a reader. I have updated my list of books of 2023 and I was really impressed. I have managed to read around 3k pages last year… a good average I suppose for someone that works full-time, with a house, a husband, two kids and a dog, without a support system always available. Of course the majority of the time I read is when I have either my parents or my in-laws around, but this year I have managed to organise myself in a way that I could read a little bit most of the days.  But you might be asking yourself how I manage to do that. I will share some of the things I do…  Plan/Cook my weekly meals Whenever I can, I will use some time of the weekend to plan the meals for the Week. Most likely, I will batch Cook on Sunday. I will sit (or better stand) for around 2 hours and Cook 5 different meals. I have some ready-made menus I have bought from @cozinhamoderna but I usually adapt it. Doing this saves me around 1h30m everyday, as I ...

  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...