Thoughts on Teaching at the Jinglingguo Kindergarten

I have been working at my mom’s kindergarten as an English teacher for the last two weeks. I was appointed to teach English to a group of 3-5-year-old kids. Overall, it was an exciting and fascinating experience for me.

On my first workday, I prepared a list of 10 basic English vocabularies for the class. I put each of these words with pictures on a cardboard to make them have a visual understanding of the word. When I started to teach the lesson, I realized that 80% of the kids knew these words already. Most of them had experiences of learning English at cram schools. I was embarrassed to underestimate their level of understanding as they yelled out the words even before I flipped to the next picture. Therefore, we did not take too long to “learn” all the words that I’ve prepared.

Another difficulty I faced was that since they were young kids, it was hard to keep them concentrated. Many of them became distracted and lost focus after about 10 minutes of learning the vocabulary. Then I decided to let them sing a song together for engagement, such as Little Star and Walking Walking. This activity helped bring their concentration back by a little. Targeting this time, I decided to review the words and end the class. The first day of class was 18 minutes.

After the first day, I came home and immediately prepared another 30 more advanced words for the next day. I also bought two bundles of snacks to reward the kids who answered correctly to enhance motivation.

On the next day, I came to the class with 40 vocabularies and snacks. Even though there were still about 70% of the kids who learned English before, the words I prepared had successfully challenged most of them. Due to the rewards, the kids in this class were also more focused on learning a more challenging curriculum. To end the class on a bright note, we ended the class by singing their favorite song.

The first week of classes was entirely focused on learning new vocabularies. There was a professional teacher who listened to my last class of the first week and gave me some suggestions:

1. The class should focus on kids, not me.

2. I should plan more activities such as games and music to keep the class active and fun.

3. I should use English all the time in class.

I summarized these points and designed more for classes next week.

The following week, my class began with a song to wake all the kids up from noon nap. Then I taught them new words about 4-5 every class. After that, we sang a song together to keep them energized and I helped them to review the words we learned towards the end of class. To end the class, as an exit ticket, we played a game together. The game was to have 4-5 teams (based on vocabularies they learned that day) and each team was assigned a word to them. When the game started, everybody squat down. I revealed one word at a time and when the word was shown, the kids of the group who were assigned to that word stood up and shouted the word. Most of the kids liked the game and it was easier for them to memorize the words this way. The class time also extended from 20 minutes to 35 minutes on the second week.

After two weeks of gaining experience in teaching at the kindergarten, I realized one thing: teaching little kids is not easy at all. Not only do I need to keep them focused and interested at my topic, but also, I need to help them memorize the word. Memorizing new words from a different language is really hard for these little kids when they are not even fluent in their first language. Regardless, throughout this opportunity, I was able to improve my teaching methods and course development by planning a lot more activities and gaining patience during the process. All in all, I feel that I have done well during the last two weeks of teaching.