Appi conference

Last 1st of May I’ve been at the 24th APPI (Portuguese association of English Teachers) conference. I had the chance to listen to great speakers and I came back home with a handful of new ideas.

Some of the speakers I had the pleasure to learn from were: “Carol Read” – “to praise or not to praise?” ; Andy Cowle – “See, play, learn!” ; Chaz Pugliese – “Creating flow: Ideas for teaching fluency” ; Steve Lever – “ The magic of creating thinking” ; David Crystal – “Internet linguistics” and Lucy Bravo – “ TKT: CLIL – The Future of Language Learning.

It’s wonderful to go back to the “university environment” where I was sitting in a chair, in a room full of people taking notes and participating in the sessions. It’s wonderful to switch back to the “student mode”.
Learning new things now feels like chewing on a candy, it leaves that sweet taste and a comforting sense of fulfilment. It’s like finding out that the world can still surprise me and that I’m still developing.
Most of all, I came out of there “Hopeful”.
Teaching is becoming more and more difficult, as the students tend to be more and more challenging. It was nice to feel that I’m not the only one who thinks like this, but it was even nicer to learn how to make Teaching easier for the teachers and more appealing/ interesting for the students.

At the end of the conference I bought this book by Carol Read – one of the speakers – which I really recommend to all primary teachers. (Until the 6th grade in Portugal). It’s called “500 Activities for the primary classroom”. I guess the title speaks for itself.

In conclusion, I invite all of you to participate on next year’s APPI conference. It really is inspiring!