March 21st to 23rd - Alphabet

This is my second class about alphabet to 1st and 2nd grade students

I already said that I do not like to teach alphabet to 1st grade students, as they are still being alphabetized in Portuguese and the pronunciations of vowels A, E and I can be very confused. But, as BNCC says we need to teach it in the 1st two months of the school year, I prepared my classes of this week to work like this: 1st part dedicated to alphabet and 2nd part dedicated to numbers (even tough numbers are not supposed to be taught now), both topics with song activities.


I always entered the classroom, greeted everybody and explained that we were going to listen to two songs that day. When I taught the first group of the week, I did not know what to do so I asked them what song they wanted to listen to first: alphabet or numbers? They answered alphabet and I found that worked well, so, for the next groups, I did not ask. Maybe because the song is lullaby, they stayed very calm. We listened to that three times: one just listening; twice listening and repeating. Before singing together I showed them my "microphone" (a water bottle or a marker that I put in front of my mouth to sing) and asked everybody to have a imaginary microphone too. I worked well, the first verse almost perfect (From A to G).

Then I asked if somebody wanted to sing it standing before the class. There were some candidates and in most of them the problem was the very low voice. They sang along with the sound box that I have, but only the fist 40 seconds of the song. As long as the song started, I turned down the volume, so we could listen more to the students than to the song. It seemed they wanted to perform, but, at the same time, were very shy for that. I asked them to repeat, emphasizing to increase voice volume, but it just worked for a few of them. Anyway, I asked everybody to applause their classmates. 

It was not mandatory to sing alone. The ones who did not want did not do. Were they pronouncing the vowels well? From A to G I could say "Yes". But the rest no. But I think that it does not really matter. Maybe with that activity they had the chance to express themselves in front of their friends; they created confidence to be the focus in a performance; they became more attentive, as they had something to do with that new information that they were learning...

In some groups, they enjoyed this dynamic so much that I even did not have time to do the numbers song, which I will explain in another post. I changed my plans during the class, because I preferred to feel their timing and kind of let them decide when it was time to move to next class part. 

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