Second Day of School Visits in Brazil

Last Friday was spent visiting three different schools, having lunch at the home of one of the teachers and visiting the impressive Science Park.  What a day it was!  Words cannot aptly describe the amazing day I had nor the gratitude I felt to the many people that worked to make it happen.


  We started our day by visiting Tonya’s school.  Tonya was wonderful and truly went above and beyond to make sure I had the appropriate parent permission forms signed as well as helping to set up my interviews with the students for my wiki page.  The interviews with the students were wonderful, and I was pleased that for the most part they were able to understand the questions I was asking in stilted Portuguese.  The school was great and once again we were made to feel like rock stars as newspaper reporters followed us around snapping our pictures at two of the three schools. 

One of my favorite parts of the Tonya’s school was the bell, which sounded through the school like a stereo speaker and created an atmosphere of a giant dance party… who said school couldn’t be fun!  Once again massive amounts of food were prepared for us in the school kitchen and we enjoyed meeting other teachers at the school.  

After leaving the school Tonya took us to her home for lunch and her family was absolutely amazing!  Her mom prepared a FEAST for us and was possibly the warmest and most welcoming woman I have ever met.  It truly brought tears to my eyes to think about how she not only welcomed 8 strangers into her home but likely spent her entire morning preparing a gourmet lunch for us.  The house was lacking in many things we would consider necessities back home, such as a giant flat screen TV and granite countertops, but it was absolutely the most beautiful house I have ever been invited into.   You could feel the love and attention paid to each and every area of the home and the warmth with which we were welcomed can simply not be described with words.  This part of the trip meant so very much to me.

After lunch we visited two more schools, the first was a school for the disabled and special needs students and the second was a primary school.  This was an amazing experience as well; particularly the school for special needs students.  Each child was very well cared for and given an immense amount of love and affection, it truly was a wonderful thing to see.  The primary school was interesting, but I have to say that I truly am more comfortable around older children and this trip again reinforced for me my decision to teach high school aged students.

The last part of our day was spent visiting the Science Park which was incredibly amazing.  They actually stayed open late just for us and gave us a private tour of the facility!  They invited us into the planetarium to see the constellations that would have been seen by the indigenous tribes looking up at the stars hundreds of years ago, it was an out of this world experience.  The park itself was amazing and gave me so many ideas I would like to incorporate into my own classroom in some way in the future.  They had an area where students could go on an “archeological dig” for dinosaur bones, watch electricity in action, see the consumption of electricity throughout the world, participate in a G7 summit, and actually walk through a topographical map of the state of Parana. While the obvious application for most of these exhibits would be in the field of science, there were certainly ways they could be incorporated into a social studies classroom as well.

After arriving at home we went out for dinner and on the way home saw a group of capoeira students.  It was amazing to watch them and I immediately fell in love with this traditional Brazilian dance/martial art.  I have decided that my next adventure must be to explore this art of capoeira! It was a very long and tiring day, but rewarding in so many ways.