Red Deer College Kindergarten Class
- Cydney W.
- Dec 2, 2016
- 2 min read
I would like to start by giving the teachers at the RDC kindergarten class credit for all their hard work and patience. There were a lot of challenges, not to mention the other student helpers to add distractions. I did not realize the amount of work and constant attention each child needed. I have taught children of this age group in swimming lessons but there were less then 10 people in each class and I only had to work with them for 45 minutes at the most. In this class, there were approximately 20 students and the time spent with was way longer, it seemed like chaos. The teachers were calm and knew how to handle each situation that came their way.
The day started with the kids lined up to enter the class and the student of the day would hold open the door, lets say her name was Emma. Each student would say thank you and show the action and sound of the letter E, followed by Emma. There was assigned seating and they each had their own journal. They sang a song about each letter they had learned so far and after the song they learned a new letter which was L and they drew a lion and a lollipop. After they wrote a sentence that correlated with the picture which was lions lick lollipops. Constantly the teacher’s assistant had to come around and correct bad habits such as: the way they held their pencil, the size of their letters and the slant of their journal. We were allowed to help the students and I found it challenging. It took them a while to write the letter and sometimes they wouldn’t write the letter properly so they had to erase it but they took so long I got impatient and erased it for them. Sometimes if they didn’t understand I would physically manipulate their hand to write the letter, this technique helped sometimes but not always. I didn’t realize how precise everything had to be. They then did a sun salutation for an activity and mobility. After a book was read with “million dollar words” that consisted of complex words and if the student could use the word in a sentence properly then they could receive a token to be used for prizes. Finally, there were stations that consisted of: free time, self portraits to practice shapes and colors, measurement of height to practice counting by tens and outlining their silhouette to practice being still.
There were so many games with aims and a variety of teaching techniques it would take a long time to explain them all. Overall there were a lot of activities and hardly any rest for the teachers. I realized I need to have more patience and shouldn’t worry if they don’t understand something the first time, things take time and practice. Personally, I don’t think I would enjoy teaching kindergarten but we shall see what happens in the future.
Comments