Professor de Inglês!

Usually teachers teach how to greet during the first weeks of the school year. I only taught them the basics (Good afternoon, Hi, Hello) and now decided to teach the other greetings, according to day time. I used the same class plan for 1st, 2nd and 3rd grades: Of course there were variations. For the 3rd grade I finished the topic with one class and a half, only. With the 1st and 2nd grades, I continued the activity in the next week. For the 1st graders it was difficult to sing, because they really do not know much English as this is their first time they have this subject. But in the other grades many students already knew what Good morning, afternoon and night mean. I feel that the concept of "Good evening" is still not clear for most and, as I only speak English, I just said it was the same as "Good night". I actually did not say that, but I pointed to the moon and stars drawing I did. But when I said "Good night" I did like I was going to sleep and wh...

1st and 2nd grades I had planned to do an alphabet song activity and a numbers song activity on the same day. For some groups it worked like that, but, for others, I had time to do only the alphabet, as they were very engaged, so I postponed the numbers part to next week. In some classes, after some time, the classroom seemed like a dance floor and that was ok for me. What was really a surprise is that "Do you know how to count? Yes, I know how to count." the part was really well pronounced by the chorus class. Were they understanding what they were saying. I do not think so, even though I used to gesticulate, pointing to the numbers board (how to count) or to myself (I) or to them (Do you) or to the head (know) or doing a positive sign with my hand (Yes), but MAYBE I am creating a kind of memory in their phonological system for English pronunciation... I do not know. I left the part from 1:38 on to a different class, to vary the subject a little bit. I am feeling that for so...

Two classes were not enough again to finish the mixing colors activity. As a warm up, I prepared a song to sing along with the students and to practice their listening skills. To check if they were understanding the song right, after each part I asked what color was pronounced. The easiest for them to understand was yellow, blue and purple. For green, red and orange I noticed that some students were in doubt. I tried to teach the verb to like by doing a heart symbol with my hands and pronouncing the color right after, like "I like green", but that was not so clear. I wanted them to sing at least that sentence of the song, so we pronounced "I like_____" and the name of the color. I tried to start a conversation with the verse "What is your favorite color?", like the song says. But, again, not everybody was paying attention. But some students from the 2nd grade got the question, and answered "purple", for example. In each class, the song played thr...

From this month on, I will not publish twice a week, but only on Mondays, because I think it was too demanding and also I wanna have some extra material for the the period when we have vacation. You probably know that if we mix blue and red we will have purple and if we mix yellow and blue we will have green. But, in case we do this experiment with colored pencils will we have the same result? The activity I planned for this week for 1st and 2nd grade students was about it. I always ask for two students to distribute the papers. In this case I had folded it, so the kids would see only the circle, the plus sign and the other circle, but not the circle and the equal sign (=). I thought I would have more control of the class like this, as many of them still do not read and commit some mistakes. Erasing colored pencils is not easy. I found that worked really well. The criteria to choose the colors they would mix were: primary colors and colors with the spelling closer to Portuguese (at lea...