Twenty years of Centro Educacional Leonardo da Vinci. Fourth year of the Bilingual Pre school and Kindergarten Program.
We started in 2006 with four classrooms and three foreign teachers. We are beginning 2009 with seven classrooms and five foreign teachers. Our program is steadily growing and creating a multicultural face. We try as much as we can to hire teachers from different English speaking countries, for we believe that their rich background will bring the children a variety of cultural experiences that will enlarge their awareness of the world and of the English language. So far we had American, English and Canadian teachers, among the Americans we had a Taiwanese-American and a Mexican-American. Hopefully we will be able to bring Australian and South African teachers some point in the future.
We are working to develop listening and speaking skills in our children, by having them immersed in the English language 4 to 5 hours a day. During the other half of the day the children have classes in Portuguese, developing not only listening and speaking skills, but also reading and writing. Through stories, songs, nursery rhymes, movies, games, chants and daily routines, the children start to build their repertoire in both languages.
From now on, everyone will be able to know a little bit more about the work developed in our program, by reading in our site, highlights from the different classes. Every week one of the teachers will be writing an article showing what he has been doing with the children during the English time.
Feel free to get in touch with us (davinci@davincivix.com.br) for more information on the program or to make any suggestions.
The pictures bellow show the children presenting their version of “The Tin Soldier”, written with the help of the teacher.