quinta-feira, 3 de junho de 2021

E-book com 30 atividades prontas para usar!

Que tal inovar nas aulas online com atividades em vídeo? Confira 30 atividades prontas para serem usadas no ebook Movie Activities for English Classes. Em formato pdf, você pode imprimir as páginas ou enviar a seus alunos em formato online.
R$ 39,90, venda direta com a autora. Entre em contato: vanessaprata@gmail.com.

 

quarta-feira, 8 de abril de 2020

Worried about what to do with your kids during quarentine? Take a look at this article!

A support guide for parents raising babies and toddlers through the coronavirus crisis

Source: https://bit.ly/2Vdw2LG
By Annabelle Timsit





It is a well-established fact that babies’ brains develop at warp speed in the first three years of life, laying critical cognitive, emotional, and social foundations. But what happens when a public health emergency like Covid-19 completely upends this time?

Parents and caregivers of children of any age are having a tough time at the moment, but parents and caregivers of infants and young toddlers have particular concerns: How will social distancing affect my child’s development? How do I keep them away from screens, as advised, when they are home all the time and I have to work? How will they develop social skills and gross motor skills if we are all locked inside? And perhaps more than most: how will I get through the day?

First, the good news: There is nothing your child needs that you are not capable of giving them within the four walls of your home. This is when babies start learning to recognize people and objects, understanding cause and effect, regulating their emotions, and speaking. In short, these are crucial moments—but to take full advantage of them, you don’t have to have a PhD in child psychology. Infants and toddlers need lots of love, attention, and stimulation to thrive, and the likeliest place for them to get it is at home with you.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, an expert on child language development, says that this time spent at home won’t harm your child’s development as long as “they have a secure base, and they know they’re loved, and they know they’re safe.” The most important thing, she says, is to ensure that your child has a routine, and plenty of self-directed activities they can do throughout the day to give them a sense of agency. “They know something is up, they see and feel it from us. And even if they don’t understand it, they get it. So, how do we create a routine? It doesn’t have to be strict, but just a schedule of this is what we’re going to do today, even if it’s running around the living room.”

But it’s not just about them—you have to be well in order to care for them well. Depression and loneliness can affect your ability to interact with your baby in the ways they need to feel safe and to take cues from you on how to move, talk, and act.

Many parents worry that their young children will miss out on learning to socialize. But Kai-leé Berke, a former preschool teacher and advisor at Promise Venture Studio, an incubator for early childhood experts to connect with tech and policy, says that’s not something parents should worry about. “A young child’s most important social interactions and community is their home community, whoever that happens to be.” If you really want your child to focus on building relationships, then there are easy things you can do to make sure that still happens under quarantine. “They could do things like draw a picture for their friend, or they could build a block structure and the parent could suggest, why don’t we take a picture of this, and I’ll text it to Michaela’s mommy so she can show her?”

This guide draws from knowledge acquired over two years of reporting for Quartz’s Rewiring Childhood project. It is in no way comprehensive, but rather it is a collection of the best resources that have been recommended to us by leading pediatricians, advocates, and developmental experts, all targeted for newborns to three years old.

As we’ve said before, and we’ll say again, the most important piece of advice we can share is to have a bit of self-compassion, and acceptance for you and your kids. No one asked for this, and no one likes it. It’s a tough time for everyone, but especially for those whose kids are young, and by definition, very demanding.
Things to do

The New York Times: Maria Russo, children’s books editor for The New York Times Book Review, has been giving advice to parents for decades on how to raise a reader. She recommends nine books for children between 2 and 4 years old that deal with anxiety and stress. Who knows, maybe reading them to your child will help calm you too. There’s also a great list of podcasts appropriate for kids ages 2 and up.

Quartz: Quartz senior reporter Jenny Anderson recommends 29 books that carry important lessons that will outlast this crisis, like how to be kind, or how to support your siblings. With libraries around the world shutting their doors, you can find many of these books online. If you’re worried about screens, know that it’s okay to expose your toddler to a screen once in a while in order to read to—and with—them. Just remember to ask them questions: “What do you think will happen next?” “Where’s the bunny?” “What sound does a duck make?” (PS: Video chats with grandparents are also okay.)

Sesame Street: Sesame Street has been making educational content for children for 50 years and research shows it is in fact, educational. Also: kids love it. There’s a trove of resources for caregivers that includes eBooks, video activities you can do inside your home, and offline games you can print, like coloring pages and a step-by-step guide to hand washing. Also keep an eye out for a weekly column with tips for parents, written by Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president for curriculum and content at Sesame Workshop. Here are two of our favorites:
“Play ‘sink and float’ in the bathtub by testing a variety of bath items: a bar of soap, a rubber ducky, a toy car, a dry sponge, empty and full small plastic travel bottles, and bath books. Once you discover which items float and which ones sink, place them in two separate containers and then, together, count how many float and how many sink.”
Make “a simple, sealed jar filled with water and brightly colored glitter. When you shake it, the glitter whirling around the inside of the jar represents how your child is feeling inside. Have her watch the glitter swirl and take deep belly breaths while the glitter slowly drifts to the bottom. When it finally settles, the two of you will be able to see through the clear water, symbolizing that your child has achieved a calmer state and giving you the opportunity to talk about the big feeling she was experiencing.”

Zero To Three: One of the leading advocacy groups for babies and toddlers in the US has a list of seasonal activities you can do with your baby or toddler for every month of the year. Each month has a theme, like texture or animals, that promotes curiosity and the development of language and motor skills. A note: This guide was written pre-pandemic, so some activities won’t be adapted to the CDC’s rules on social distancing. Zero To Three also has a more generalized resource guide for parents tied to coronavirus.

The ECLKC is a part of Head Start, a pre-K program in the US for low-income children and their families. Their handbook has activities parents can do with babies and toddlers outside and in every room of the house. Again, this is pre-coronavirus, so you will have to bypass some sections, like the one about exploring your community. But some areas are definitely not off-limits, like your family’s “surprise drawer,” the one “where all the odds and ends are put.” ECLK recommends turning this drawer into a a treasure chest for your child to explore on a rainy day.


Things to learn
Everything you do with infants and toddlers is a learning experience. Reading and singing builds literacy, counting aids early numeracy, and games like head, shoulders knees and toes are all about gross motor skills. Kids love to cook and clean (seriously) as long as you make it age-appropriate (and don’t expect anything to actually get clean). Here are some others:

Beanstalk: This website offers live and on-demand classes for children between 1.5 and 6 years old that are personalized based on their age and developmental needs. The teachers are early childhood development experts, and the platform comes recommended by Promise Venture Studio. It’s worth scrolling through their extensive resource guide, using the parameters that matter to you and your family, to find more learning platforms for your child.

Easy Peasy: Most experts don’t recommend screen time for children under the age of 2. But while keeping them away from screens as much as possible is still the goal, a little bit of quality screen-based content with your child is okay, as long as you are experiencing it with them. Enter Easy Peasy, a tried-and-tested mobile platform that provides age-specific learning games for children between zero and five.

Tinkergarten: This free website offers weekly play scenarios that challenge young children to develop their socio-emotional, communication, and motor skills. In one example, parents turn a cardboard box into a “not-a-box,” a magical opportunity to make the ordinary, extraordinary. Bonus point: Tinkergarten comes with an online community of caregivers in the #OutdoorsAll4 Facebook Group.

Playful Learning Landscapes: Urban designers, psychologists, and developmental experts work under the umbrella of this joint venture, established last year by the Brookings Institution, to make urban spaces more family-friendly. They’ve turned bus stops into playgrounds and supermarkets into classrooms. Now, they are going indoors, and will soon publish recommendations on how to turn your home into a space where your child can exercise, learn, and play. In the meantime, we caught up with Hirsh-Pasek, one of the group’s leaders, to ask her for a preview. She had three recommendations:
“Two-year-olds like to bang and stir and they can help out with cooking. Cooking can be like a chemistry class. Investigate why water bubbles when it gets hot, or how food changes consistency when it’s blended or baked.”
“We all have fort material. Make a fort, then hide inside—do you really become invisible? And why does it get dark in there? And why does it get dark when you come out?”
“Little kids love to plant indoor gardens. If you happen to have some soil around and you were preparing to plant flowers, plant them inside. Order some seeds, get some of your veggies started inside, and watch them grow. That’s biology at work, and it’s allowing the kids to really have some agency in all of this.”
Care for caregivers

As Rebecca Parlakian, Zero To Three’s senior director of programs, told Arizona’s early childhood agency, “taking care of ourselves is the oxygen mask approach, like in a plane, when the flight attendant tells us to put on our own mask before helping others.” Self-care isn’t frivolous; it’s the only way for you and your child to stay well. With that in mind, here are a few resources that could help, provided there is someone in your home who can take care of your child so that you can have a short break:

Parents Together: This website offers tips on managing babies and toddlers, answers to your questions, and a community of similarly-overwhelmed parents to lean on. You can also join their Facebook group, “Coronavirus Parents: Parenting in a Pandemic,” which already has more than 35,000 members.

Sesame Street: Your favorite muppets have some advice for you too. Here’s one: “Get a nice big glass of water and find a comfy spot to sit. Let your child know, ‘I’m just going to sit and (read/think/breathe) while I drink this glass of water.’ Explain that you’ll be available once the glass is empty. Children have difficulty keeping track of time—this is a concrete way to help them understand that you are taking a few minutes to yourself.”

The New York Times: This list is updated weekly and will give you dozens of options for things to watch, listen to, cook, and read.

Culture time: If you are into art, you can also take a virtual tour of 12 world-famous museums, from the British Museum in London to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. If you like music, you can listen to one of the dozens of live virtual concerts that NPR is compiling here.

Headspace or Stop, Breathe, & Think: These two apps are great choices even if you are new to mindfulness and meditation. They both have large libraries full of free meditations, sleep, and movement exercises. Stop, Breathe & Think has the added value of offering lessons tailored to specific emotions you may be feeling that day (and let’s face it, you’re probably feeling all of them). Try the one on gratitude and see how you like it. And if you’d like to meditate with your family, consider Inner Explorer.
Learn about your child

Harvard Center on the Developing Child: This video will teach you how you can help build your baby’s brain by engaging in what scientists call “serve-and-return” interactions—where, like in tennis, your child “serves” up an emotion, through a babble or a gesture, and you, their caregiver, “returns” it with a look, a reaction, or gesture of affection.

Vroom: This free app or text-based platform is funded by the Bezos Family Foundation and will give you science-based prompts so you can help build your baby’s brain and increase your interactions with them so they can learn from you.

Ready4K: If your toddler was attending a childcare program before this pandemic, their childcare provider may be eligible for a free text-based program run by Ready4K that will send you weekly facts about your child’s development and prompts for what you can do to promote it.

Netflix: The 6-episode series Babies dives into how babies learn to sleep, eat, crawl, speak, walk, and love. It’s a highly-digestible show, full of interviews with some of the leading developmental experts, and examples of real families figuring things out.

Promise Venture Studio: In a series of very short videos, Berke will teach you her tips and tricks for guiding children’s behavior at home, from setting rules to picking your battles. Berke also runs a parallel blog dedicated to caregivers in this pandemic. Read her inaugural post, “Everything I Learned About Surviving a Pandemic, I Learned as a Preschool Teacher.”

Patricia Kuhl’s TED Talk: Kuhl, an influential researcher on speech and hearing in early childhood at the University of Washington, explains in this popular TED Talk how infants learn language, and what that shows us about the social nature of human learning. Bonus: It’s only 10 minutes long.

Books! If you have the time to read books right now—well, first, please tell us your secret. But second, below are books that will teach you everything you need to know about how infants learn and what you can do to help.

terça-feira, 5 de fevereiro de 2019

World's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/world-26-richest-people-own-as-much-as-poorest-50-per-cent-oxfam-report

Sad statistics, but a great topic for discussing with students, in addition to working with vocabulary.

World's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam

Charity calls for 1% wealth tax, saying it would raise enough to educate every child not in school

Luxury yachts in Monaco

The growing concentration of the world’s wealth has been highlighted by a report showing that the 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population.
In an annual wealth check released to mark the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the development charity Oxfam said 2018 had been a year in which the rich had grown richer and the poor poorer.
It said the widening gap was hindering the fight against poverty, adding that a wealth tax on the 1% would raise an estimated $418bn (£325bn) a year – enough to educate every child not in school and provide healthcare that would prevent 3 million deaths.
Oxfam said the wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe had increased by $900bn in 2018 – or $2.5bn a day. The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population.
As a result, the report concluded, the number of billionaires owning as much wealth as half the world’s population fell from 43 in 2017 to 26 last year. In 2016 the number was 61.
Among the findings of the report were:
  • In the 10 years since the financial crisis, the number of billionaires has nearly doubled.
  • Between 2017 and 2018 a new billionaire was created every two days.
  • The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, saw his fortune increase to $112bn. Just 1% of his fortune is equivalent to the whole health budget for Ethiopia, a country of 105 million people.
  • The poorest 10% of Britons are paying a higher effective tax rate than the richest 10% (49% compared with 34%) once taxes on consumption such as VAT are taken into account.
Oxfam’s director of campaigns and policy, Matthew Spencer, said: “The massive fall in the number of people living in extreme poverty is one of the greatest achievements of the past quarter of a century but rising inequality is jeopardising further progress.

“The way our economies are organised means wealth is increasingly and unfairly concentrated among a privileged few while millions of people are barely subsisting. Women are dying for lack of decent maternity care and children are being denied an education that could be their route out of poverty. No one should be condemned to an earlier grave or a life of illiteracy simply because they were born poor.

“It doesn’t have to be this way – there is enough wealth in the world to provide everyone with a fair chance in life. Governments should act to ensure that taxes raised from wealth and businesses paying their fair share are used to fund free, good-quality public services that can save and transform people’s lives.”
The report said many governments were making inequality worse by failing to invest enough in public services. It noted that about 10,000 people per day die for lack of healthcare and there were 262 million children not in school, often because their parents were unable to afford the fees, uniforms or textbooks.
Oxfam said governments needed to do more to fund high-quality, universal public services through tackling tax dodging and ensuring fairer taxation, including on corporations and the richest individuals’ wealth, which it said were often undertaxed.
A global wealth tax has been called for by the French economist Thomas Piketty, who has said action is needed to arrest the trend in inequality.
The World Inequality Report 2018 – co-authored by Piketty – showed that between 1980 and 2016 the poorest 50% of humanity only captured 12 cents in every dollar of global income growth. By contrast, the top 1% captured 27 cents of every dollar.
Oxfam said that in addition to tackling inequality at home, developed nations currently failing to meet their overseas aid commitments could raise the missing billions needed to tackle extreme poverty in the poorest countries by increasing taxes on extreme wealth.
China’s rapid growth over the past four decades has been responsible for much of the decline in extreme poverty but Oxfam said World Bank data showed the rate of poverty reduction had halved since 2013. In sub-Saharan Africa, extreme poverty was on the increase.
Oxfam said its methodology for assessing the gap between rich and poor was based on global wealth distribution data provided by the Credit Suisse global wealth data book, covering the period from June 2017 to June 2018. The wealth of billionaires was calculated using the annual Forbes billionaires list published in March 2018.

domingo, 8 de outubro de 2017

Lançamento! Movie Activities for English Classes

Saiu do forno!

Meu primeiro E-book, Movie Activities for English Classes, acaba de ser lançado pela editora Zannah!

É uma obra para professores de inglês tornarem suas aulas ainda mais dinâmicas e divertidas, por meio de atividades com trechos de filmes.
Trata-se de um material completo, para que os alunos possam aprender ou aperfeiçoar o idioma treinando compreensão auditiva, gramática, vocabulário, conversação e escrita.
O livro é organizado em três níveis principais: básico, intermediário ou avançado e é pronto para usar! Basta imprimir as páginas e aplicar as atividades em sala de aula!
Cada atividade é um plano de aula completo para durar de 45 a 60 minutos, contendo exercícios de warm-up, pre-viewing, while-viewing e post-viewing, bem como atividades extras sugeridas.
Além de filmes, há também uma seção baseada em séries, totalizando 30 atividades (ou 30 planos de aula)! Todas com respostas.

Torne suas aulas ainda mais interessantes e motivadoras!

quarta-feira, 5 de outubro de 2016

Expressões de finanças

Por Companhia de Idiomas - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/domina-express%C3%B5es-em-ingl%C3%AAs-sobre-finan%C3%A7as-fa%C3%A7a-o-teste-idiomas 

Em tempos recessivos, você saberia falar de quantas formas sobre desemprego (unemployment), por exemplo?
Há mais de uma maneira de dizer “ser despedido”:
- To be made redundant
- To be fired
- To be dismissed
- To get sacked
- To lose your job (perder o emprego, o que é diferente de "to miss your job", que significa sentir falta ou saudade do trabalho).

Para as empresas, o ato de dispensar um funcionário pode ser descrito como "to cut the workforce" ou "to lay off staff".

Vamos ver como está seu conhecimento de expressões sobre finanças e economia na língua inglesa? Relacione as expressões na coluna da esquerda às suas definições na coluna da direita:
1. To weather the storm
2. To be in good shape 
3. To live beyond your means 
4. To pay the price 
5. To foot the bill 
6. To be at rock bottom
7. To be in free fall 
8. To burn a hole in your pocket 
9. To cost an arm and a leg 
10. To splash out on

( ) to keep falling without anything stopping the fall 
( ) to be very expensive
( ) not earn enough money, so you need to borrow money 
( ) to pay a lot for an important event 
( ) to not be able to stop spending money
( ) to survive bad times
( ) to be so low you cannot go any further down
( ) to pay for someone else 
( ) to be strong 
( ) to pay for your mistakes

Agora, preencha as frases abaixo com as expressões do exercício 1, na coluna da esquerda:
1. Fortunately, we're ____________________ financially, after all the problems we faced last year.
2. The economy must be _________________ now.
3. We're trying _____________________ by lowering our prices.
4. He can't just go shopping. Money _____________________.
5. We have to stop ___________________.
6. They're ________________ their trip to the States.
7. The country is _______________ for its previous spending policies.
8. The Brazilian economy has been ________________.
9. It ___________________ to buy an apartment in São Paulo.
10. She took me out for dinner and ____________.
Respostas
Primeiro exercício
1. To weather the storm = to survive bad times
2. To be in good shape = to be strong
3. To live beyond your means = not earn enough money, so you need to borrow money
4. To pay the price = to pay for your mistakes
5. To foot the bill = to pay for someone else
6. To be at rock bottom = to be so low you cannot go any further down
7. To be in free fall = to keep falling without anything stopping the fall
8. To burn a hole in your pocket = to not be able to stop spending money
9. To cost an arm and a leg = to be very expensive
10. To splash out on = to pay a lot for an important event
Segundo exercício
1. Fortunately, we're in good shape financially, after all the problems we faced last year.
2. The economy must be at rock bottom now.
3. We're trying to weather the storm by lowering our prices.
4. He can't just go shopping. Money burns a hole in his pocket.
5. We have to stop living beyond our means.
6. They're splashing out on their trip to the States.
7. The country is paying the price for its previous spending policies.
8. The Brazilian economy is in free fall.
9. It costs an arm and a leg to buy an apartment in São Paulo.
10. She took me out for dinner and footed the bill.
Escrito por Lígia Crispino. Publicado em 27/07 na coluna semanal da Exame.com. Editado por Lígia Crispino para o blog da Companhia de Idiomas.