A journey through kindergarten's world...
In this page I'm going to share my enriching experience as a teacher trainee at Kindergarten level (with a group of 5 years old learners).First, I would like to say that I hope these lines could be helpful to anyone reading them, teachers, future teachers, students, parents or any people who feel curious about an experience like that. From my humble opinion, I think we all can learn from others and improve our own performance.
When working with very young learners, personally, I realized about the importance of see the world through children's eyes. It is a way to enter their lives, connect with them and discover their interests and feelings. There is such a simple but crucial thing which is just "to go down!". Yes people, that simple thing places us in children world and helps us to know how the see the things! It could sound silly, but kneeling down, sitting down on the floor or on children's little chairs in the classroom, makes them see us (teachers or future teachers) closer to them and it helps to build trusting and a safety environment for them. Creativity, being open-mind and a good observer are other skills to bear in mind in a ESL kindergarten classroom because catching children attention, keeping it and have them motivated is a challenging work. Anyway, it can be reached by applying these skills when designing the lesson plans and when sharing each class with children.
As I expressed in my reflective learning activity, my teaching philosophy is...
"If I am
having fun together with children during the lesson, the thing is
working..." Play, fun, discovering, are all part of children development,
so they must be hand in hand with learning. I think that children learn the
best when they are doing what they like and what they enjoy most.
Social Constructivism theory (Vygotsky ) accompanied my practical teaching in kindergarten; having in
mind that it focuses on children’ cognitive development as an essentially
social process. Thus, I planned my lessons based on children cognitive and
skills development through scaffolding, supporting children according their
Zone of proximal development, to allow them to construct their own knowledge
and learn progressively. Peer collaboration is also a principle of this theory
and it was present in my lessons too, since children can support each other,
almost without realizing because they observe and copy what other do or say. I always tried to
provide students with a meaningful context in which they could acquire the
language in a natural way. We, adults, teacher do not introduce the language
within children, but we offer an environment, interesting situations and
opportunities to them to create their own knowledge and internalize it
spontaneously.
Children need to
play!... Play, creativity, solving problem were pillars of my practicum too. It
is necessary for enjoyment and motivation but also to develop motor,
cognitive, social and language skills, to develop creativity and communication
competence. Teaching English in early childhood should consider this aspect as
well as promote surprising, exploration and discovering. So, when planning my
lessons I also took in mind what Bruner (1915 – 2016) suggests: children learn
by guided discovering which takes place during exploration, motivated by curiosity. That is why it is
crucial for teachers to provide appropriated material to stimulate young
learners through observation, comparison, analysis (differences /similarities)
strategies.Those resource and
material that allowed me to lead my teaching experience towards these concepts
were among others, storytelling, songs, games, role play, puppets, coloring,
doing art, creating stories, TPR activities and more.I tried to propose
activities to foster multiple intelligences (Gardner) development in order to
reach all students, to attend their needs and inclusion and to help children to
develop their potentials. It is magical how we, as teachers, can help learners
to discover their potential in the classroom from a very early age…future
dancers, artists, or scientists can emerge there if they receive the correct
stimulus.
Moving, doing,
speaking! I noticed how children acquiring knowledge better if they experiment
and feel thing with their bodies. TPR activities, dancing, singing, finding,
touching objects, acting for example, favored language exposure,
internalization and a posterior production and it became the learning process
more meaningful.Listening, smiling,
hugging, caring about learners feelings!Last but not least, I
think that it is really essential to include affection in our teaching.
Learning process is emotional too and it means caring about children, being
friendly, encouraging them, being positive (even when offering a language correction),
listening to them, letting them express their feeling, being comprehensive,
sensitive, and supporting them when feeling upset. Sometimes, only a hand on
the back, a hug, a caress can change a child’s bad day and their affection and
energy can help us adults, to give a twist to a possible bad mood.
Athletic, agile, artist, creative, funny, imitator, singer, musician, dancer, face-makers, voice actor = teachers at kindergarten!! Teachers or we teacher trainees, may feel unable to have these varied skill. However, and coming back to the first lines on this page, if we are will and capable to see through children eyes and enter their world, these skills arouse naturally, and we may not know from where or how it happened. I consider important to distinguish between "feeling unable" from "feeling unwilling", since that the second option could be an obstacle in our way.
The following photo
summarizes my words and my experience…
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