The Olympics

Check out the article that Telma and I wrote (okay, mainly her:)) on the Olympics and being Citizens of the World. It was published in Londrina's newspaper(July 30) and in UEL's newspaper on August 13! See links on the right-hand side.

I always seem to be in a different country when the Olympics are happening, which is a bummer because unless you have cable t.v., the coverage is never as complete as in the U.S. I would love to be able to watch the entire gymnastics competition, but since Brazil is not one of the very top competitors, this is not the sport they show the most often here. We see a lot of handball and volleyball, soccer and judo. These are not the sports I want to watch - agg! But it is always interesting to see the games from the perspective of another country. What sports do they most enjoy? What is their view of the other countries participating? And which sports are they best at? Of course, Brazil is great at soccer, but apparently they have never won an Olympic gold medal in this sport. They concentrate more on the World Cup and other tournaments. The women's soccer team is excellent as well, as is the women's volleyball team. I have yet to see any of those matches, however, because the games are only on here from 12:00am to 2:00am and from 5:00am to 7:00am!

At any rate, I plan to keep watching as much as possible. Maybe I will learn something about sports that I have hardly watched before:)

Enjoy the games!

SEISIGNO (Language and Literature event at UEL)

VI Seminário de Estudos sobre Linguagem e Significação (Selisigno) e VII Simpósio de Leitura da UEL, eventos simultâneos que devem reunir cerca de 500 participantes, de Londrina, região e estados vizinhos.


SELISIGNO is an event that had presentations, speeches and mini courses, among other things. It took place on UEL's campus this year, and on Fridady I had the opportunity to give one of the mini courses to about 30 teachers and future
teachers on how to use authentic material and realia in the classroom when
teaching a foreign language.

This was fun to prepare because it's all the types of materials you would like to see as a student learning a language: local newspapers, travel brochures, local maps and restaurant menus, tv news, movie trailers, music, etc. The only problem was that this for teachers of all disciplines so I had to give it in Portuguese - 4 hours! But actually, it went pretty well, despite my mistakes. The teachers were very patient and I think I was still able to make myself understood.

It was an excellent experience and I'm really glad I was able to present
at this event. Thanks to the coordinators of SELISIGNO at UEL and to Viviane Furtoso (Coordinator of the Portuguese for foreigners classes at UEL) for giving me the opportunity to participate!

Leni's birthday at Mister Cuca

Celebrating Leni's birthday (sitting down, left) at one of the best bakeries in Londrina, Mister Cuca, with her whole family and one of her close friends.

Oficinas com professores do NRE (Reuniões temáticas)

I had shown them the pronunciation commercial of the German Coast Guard (you can still see some of the vocab on the board:))

In Brazil, the cities have a center for state teacher education called Nucleo. They have former English and Portuguese teachers who work there and go to the public schools, give workshops, and are a source of help and information for the public schools teachers in the area. Some of the professors at UEL are helping them to give a series of themed workshops for teachers of 5th to
12th grade on the teachers' free day (Monday). Only one school is chosen per town, so teachers can choose which school and city is closest to them, and attend that workshop.

So far, I have gone to two schools, one in Porecatu and another in Rolandia (about 45minutes to 1 hour outside of Londrina). The public school teachers in our state of Parana have received what they call a TV Pen Drive. For some reason, in Portuguese, they use the English term "pen drive" which doesn't mean anything to us. This is like a USB port, and the TVs serve as large computers which teachers can plug in a memory stick and use to show pictures, power point presentations, play movies and listen to music during class. They are a great tool, but most of the teachers are not very familiar with them yet and they wanted to learn more about how to use them during these workshops. I knew nothing about them either, but had to learn, so that I could use it to give the teachers ideas for their classrooms.

The workshops I have done have been on visual literacy (using images and film clips) for the classroom. We have focused on lesson plans with The Olympics since that is current and there are many activities they can do. We spend about 2 hours looking at how to use the images and then the teachers work in the language labs with a pedogogue from Nucleo to learn how to use the computer and save images, and convert them on to a flash drive to plug into the tv and use during class.

So far, the meetings have been really successful. Although, they are supposed to be for English teachers only, and in the first workshop there was one Spanish teacher who didn't speak any English, so I had to do the workshop in Portuguese! This was actually good practice for me, and I learned a lot, even if it would still be preferable to do them in English. I have one more workshop in this series, and then we will return to all the same schools but with a different focus for the workshops, probably working with evaluation techniques for the classroom.

Here are some photos from the workshop in Rolandia.


Teachers doing pair work while I figure out the tv!



Me trying to work with the tv again


Teachers watching the presen-tation




Teachers of Rolandia and Anisia from Nucelo (front center) in the comp.
lab of the school