A note for Kindergarten Teacher
BEING A PROFESSIONAL TEACHER
Being a professional teacher is challenging and needs a long process. It is impossible that a person can be success to teach in the classroom without any techniques, approaches, knowledge, and strategies. Are you ready to be a professional teacher? Professional means: we do our best to be a teacher. There are four things that the teachers need to have;
1. Personality Competence. As a good teacher, we have to develop good personality which can match with the students. We need to be patient, and create good ways of teaching during the classroom. Children are talkative, active, tactile, critical and sometimes, uncontrolled. It is our duty to make them discipline and smart, of course. This competence is needed especially to control the classroom.
2. Pedagogical competence. Teacher needs to be able to develop their techniques in teaching, creates many approaches in the classroom, make a good lesson plan and try to apply them during the classroom.
3. Professional competence. As a professional teacher, mastering our scope of studies is the most important thing to do, because children are easily to absorb something new. SO, if we teach them wrong theories, they will remember them for the rest of the students’ life. We don’t want that to happen, do we?
4. Social competence. It is related to abilities in cooperating with another teachers, parents and students. Communication technique is very important in order to build a good relationship.
THINGS RELATED TO ENGLISH CLASS FOR CHILDREN
Kindergarten teacher is a special teacher. If we teach student with wrong techniques, we may make them traumatic with English. So, with the right approach, we will make them love English and they will love it for the rest of their life. Before entering the English class for kindergarten students, we need to understand the nature of children:
- They are very active
- They are easily to get bored
- They don’t hope to be ignored
- They can be frustrated
- They are rebel
- They don’t want to socialize with a new group
- They like to interrupt
- They like playing around
- They are tactile
After getting to know the nature of children, we also need to understand how the children they behave:
- If the students do not understand with the lesson, help them to understand by simplifying the activities
- Try to think a new activity every time we start the class, in order not to make the students get bored
- If the students do not respect us, let them know that we are their teacher that can help them understand English. But keep treating them with respect. Don’t ever underestimate them.
- Let students keep attention to us by: draw children in, give them equal attention.
- When we teach, try to move around
- Stay near badly student and be calm
- Find what the children like and start making activities to make them enjoy the class.
- Choose activities carefully
- Communicate the problems with parents
- Do group projects
- Etc
CURRICULUM AND SYLLABUS
The next thing that needs to be considered is the curriculum and syllabus. What are the differences between a "curriculum" and a "syllabus"? These terms are widely used; it may therefore seem a bit confusing to define them. However, these words mean different things. "Syllabus" refers to the content or subject matter of an individual subject, whereas "curriculum" refers to the totality of content to be taught and aims to be realized within one school or educational system" Curricular guidelines lay out a program's educational philosophy, specify purposes and course content, identify implementation constraints and articulate assessment and evaluation criteria. They also include banks of materials that teachers can modify to meet the needs of their learners. Syllabuses, on the other hand, traditionally represent the content of an individual course and specify how this content is graded and sequenced. According to this traditional understanding of what a syllabus is, therefore, there is a further distinction between syllabus content and methodology, on the grounds that the "what" and the "how" of teaching should be kept distinct from each other. More recently, however, it has been argued that syllabuses should also include the methodological procedures that are used to organize classroom instruction (Nunan, 1988). According to this view, the traditional distinction between syllabus content (the "what" of instruction) and methodology (the "how" of teaching) therefore becomes blurred. It then becomes theoretically possible to speak of a "methodological syllabus".
Curriculum for Kindergarten students must include the following aspects:
a. Motor Skills Development The teacher tries to develop their students’ motor skill. As kindergarten students, they have not already got good motor skills, like cutting picture, following a rope, tracing, stand with one feet, jump so high up and so on.
b. English Language Skills Common things about learning English are:
- Listening skills
- Writing skills
- Speaking skills
- Reading skills
c. Creativity We can practice students' creativity by giving them some activities that can stimulate their imagination, like coloring, drawing, writing stories, telling stories, dancing, playing music instruments, and so on.
d. Social Skills One of the reasons why parents send their children to school is that they want their children to be able to socialize in a new community and find some differences in it. This is our duty as a teacher to observe the students’ social skills, like:
- Can they communicate with their friends?
- Can they get to know their friends in the classroom?
- Can they greet another student when they meet in another place?
- Is it OK for them to share the crayons with another student?
- Etc
e. Mathematical Skills Life is also fulfilled with mathematical and numerical things. We cannot separate mathematics with our life. These mathematical things relate to:
- Matching
- Ordering
- Arranging
- Equals
- Minus
- Etc
