March 8th and 9th - International Women Day

For those days, I had already prepared a song activity. On Sunday I realized there was going to be an important date during the week, so plans changed. A friend had shared a nice International Women Day activity that I share with you below:

I decided to start the class teaching the word WOMAN using a picture of a super hero most of them probably knew. I had the pic in my telephone and walked around the class showing it:


Use this key word taught, it was easier to explain about the date and what they were going to do in the activity. On the other hand, with one of the groups (4th grade 4), I did not show the picture and they understood maybe faster than the others.

The 4th grade 5 class was a disaster. It looked like they were testing me, telling jokes the whole class, walking around and asking to go to the toilet. We even did not have time to finish, while on the other group, we sang "happy birthday" to the ones who had their birthdays in January and February, completed the paper and half of the class presented the woman they admire to their classmates.

In an overall, the English only approach that I am using worked well. They understood what they were supposed to do. The only little misunderstanding was that, instead of drawing the profession and the food, some of the kids wrote. But I told some of them how to write that vocabulary in English.

In the text "Constituents and Categories of Methods", the difference among Language-centered, learner-centered and learning-centered is explained. In the former two methods, language learning is largely intentional, while in learning-centered it is incidental. I already told here some situations in which I noticed some students learned some vocabulary, but I was not formally teaching that vocabulary. 

Guilherme, from 5th grade 3, was drawing his sister and I asked about her hair, using my hands and my head to help him understand the difference between long and short: "Does you sister has loooong hair or short hair?". Surprinsingly he answered: "Médio hair". He learnt the word "hair" while having a conversation with me! That was the nicest moment of the week to me. 
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