I am very happy and honored to welcome you to our iTDi course!

I am very happy and honored to welcome you to our iTDi course! Teaching Young Learners Affectively is a course that will empower you to connect better with your students and to create an affective bond between them and English. Every week you will be full of ideas to put in practice with your learners. Get ready!

But first, let's build our international group by getting to know ourselves better. I will start it by introducing myself.

My name is Juan Uribe and I have been an English teacher since 1992, when I first started teaching children in São Paulo, Brazil. I have always been passionate about playful ways of learning, specially with all those things that were not created as teaching resources such as pegs, yo-yos, stones, and specially puppets.

My passion led me to create a school together with my sister Sosô where young learners are eager and excited to learn English. I spent the last two years of my life learning, researching, and sharing my affective language learning journey with teachers around the world. One last thing is that I love frogs and that I have a loyal companion called Buddy the Frog.

Now it's your turn! Please share where you come from and your experience with young learners. Make sure you also mention something personal as well!

Greetings from Brazil! Welcome again!!!

Comments

  1. Ayat TawelApril 2, 2016 at 8:03 AM

    It's a great pleasure to join your course Juan. You have always inspired us to use lots of new ideas to motivate our students and enjoy teaching YLs . We are ready for lots of fun to come .

    ReplyDelete
  2. Juan UribeApril 3, 2016 at 4:52 AM

    Hi Ayat! Thank you for your lovely comment. I am ready to learn and share with all of you. Thank you for all the support you have given me throughout the years! Hugs from Brazil!!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TASK 2: Getting ready for storytelling.

TASK 2: Getting ready for storytelling. I have a group of 12 kids ranging from 7 to 8 years old. They are already familiarized with the characters of the book (Tina the tortoise, monkey, own, duck and rabbit). The leading character is Tina the tortoise. This is a pre-teaching activity and I bring realia objects to the classroom like: football, a coat, socks, a cap and a mug. I ask kids where Tina is: where is Tina? ( I act like I'm looking for her..) Oh look! Tina is in her shell! Tina come out and play! ( sound of a negative answer) Help me kids! Repeat: Tina come out and play! ( sound of a negative answer again). Let's try again but louder! Tina, come out and play! Tina answers: No, no! It's cold outside! I say: Tina let's swim! ( I make the gesture) Tina answers: no, no! It' cold outside! I let children have ideas showing the objects inside the box! Let's play football! Children keep trying to convince her (Put on a coat! Put on a cap! Put on your socks!). A...
Read more

Finding the right audience and making writing meaningful are two of the major challenges teachers face when...

Finding the right audience and making writing meaningful are two of the major challenges teachers face when designing writing activities. What affective strategies have you used that achieved these goals? Imagine asking a ten-year old student to write about the impact of the economic collapse in the USA. This student will not have much to say and he/she will feel frustrated. Now imagine asking a 17-year-old student to write about his/her favorite toy. This student will not feel excited to write about this because it is not part of his/her reality anymore. Of course, these are extreme examples, but we do have to take into consideration many aspects such as students's age, background, reality and interests when designing writing activities. Besides relating to students lives and realities writing acitivities should also cover three moments: pre writing, writing and post writing. In the first stage, we should activate students memories, feelings and senses providing them with the ...
Read more

Discussion task #2

Discussion task #2 Finding the right audience and making writing meaningful are two of the major challenges teachers face when designing writing activities. What affective strategies have you used that achieved these goals? 1) I try to personalize writing as much as possible. I usually start talking about myself to get students at ease and more open to share their own feelings and ideas towards the writing topic. Then I adapt the task to allow students to express themselves in a comfortable and confident way. 2) Finding the right audience is definitely a key issue in all writing tasks but it's even more important with young learners as they need to feel their writing is authentic and will be read by real audience. That's why I try to do peer check/correction before I read it myself. Whenever possible, I try to have students write to each other and reply back. As a different version of it, we created at our center (A wise owl) which students write to and get personalized replies...
Read more