SECTION TWO
* Teaching Kindergarten Learners:
Teaching at Kindergarten Level is one of the most challenging experiences that teachers may experience in their teaching training. Teachers at Kindergarten Level have a lot of the same responsibilities as other teachers, but also they have to take into account that most of their young learners will be experiencing school for the first time. Accordingly, teaching at Kindergarten Level requires integrating Young Learners into the world of learning, as Kindergarten is also the bridge between early childhood care while introducing children into the learning process and elementary school.
It is important to bear in mind that Kindergarten students have a lot of enthusiasm and energy while learning, so they are not expected to be sat at their desks or to be quiet all day. Kindergarten is a Level which gives learners the opportunity to grow and develop through play (the way children learn best). It is a stage for children to expand their love for learning, build knowledge, develop their ability to interact with others, and explore ways of reaching out to the world. Furthermore, when we (as future teachers) provide students with opportunities to talk about what they are learning, we are helping them to construct meaning and learn from their expeiences. In this way, children may be working together, problem-solving and sharing ideas and activities. This helps children learn how to think through problems and find solutions together.
In addition, it is important to prepare Kindergarten students for success in school. A useful teaching strategy to put into practice in lessons is reading them aloud, which helps to reach this purpose. Read-alouds helps build listening skills, comprehension skills and also speaking skills.
Furthermore, music and audiovisual activities help teachers to gain successful lessons, as children love listening to songs and watching interactive videos. If we employ audiovidual material in our lessons when teaching a topic, children may feel even more motivated to participate and interact with their classmates and teacher, but most importantly, they tend to remember audivisual activities learned during lessons. I consider that choosing to include audiovisual resources at Kindergarten Level is essential, as they make students have fun and retain skills.
- Here, I will share my Mock Lesson Plans which I designed for Kindergarten Level. The teaching points of these lessons are "Numbers from 1 to 10" and "Pets":
* The Didactic Unit I prepared for Kindergarten Level is "Toys everywhere", and the teaching points are "Toys": a teddy bear, a car, a plane, a rope, a kite, a doll. I designed different activities to develop during lessons, which are connected and related to follow coherence and cohesion between stages. The development of the activities are based on the different points I mentioned above, in order to engage kindergarten learners in the learning process.
*DIDACTIC UNIT: "TOYS EVERYWHERE":
- During the development of Week Nº 1, the activities are focussed on introducing toys' vocabulary to students, incorporating new vocabulary about toys and new sentence structures, identifying several toys, developing listening and speaking skills, and interacting with the teacher and their classmates online (through individual work and collaborative work).
WEEK 1:
- During the development of Week Nº 2, I prepared activities in which students may relate toys to colours, by identifying coloured toys, introducing drawings of toys connected to colours, and developing short dialogues with the teacher and their classmates.
WEEK 2:
- During the development of Week Nº 3, I prepared activities in which students may relate toys to numbers, by identifying amount of toys, introducing amount of different toys, participating in creative works about toys connected to numbers, and interacting with the teacher and their classmates (through individual and collaborative work).
WEEK 3:
- During the development of Week Nº 4, I prepared activities about toys connected to animals, by identifying animals' toys, developing creative tasks in relation to animals' toys, improving listening and speaking skills, and interacting with their classmates and teacher (through individual and collaborative work).
WEEK 4:
* FINAL REFLECTION:
The development of the Didactic Unit "Toys Everywhere" for Kindergarten Level was a new challenge for me, as I have never designed lesson plans for Kindergarten learners (because English is not a subject available in the Kindergarten syllabus at any Kindergarten in my city). For this reason, I was really enthusiastic to learn and explore the different approaches used at Kindergarten Level, the strategies employed at this level, and also the kind of material and resources advisable to work with Young Learners. I used different Web Tools, online resources and authentic material which helped me a lot to develop the different activities I prepared for the lesson plans designed. An important point to take into account, is to provide Young Learners with authentic material and audiovisual activities, which help them to acquire new knowledge, to feel confident and motivated to participate in lessons, to develop their creativity and to interact with their classmates and teachers by taking part actively in the learning process.
I used some scaffolding strategies during the development of the Didactic Unit, such as "show and tell" which helps students to understand commands and
instructions in a better way, and it allows them to make connections visually, relate vocabulary with authentic material and associate pictures with content vocabulary in
order to acquire knowledge easily.
The use of ‘visual aids’ such as pictures, photos, authentic material, video presentations and songs which I used to develop some activities,
is other important strategy which helps students visually to relate contents,
represent their ideas, identify vocabulary, guide and shape students’ ideas and associate content vocabulary.
In addition, I used ‘modeling and gesturing’ when giving instructions, as it allows Young Learners to understand commands and issues developed during the different stages of lessons.
Moreover, I would like to remark that the material given by the tutor, her advices, guidelines and feedback were really valuable and useful during the development of this Didactic Unit, as they helped me to improve and realized about some features in relation to the design of lesson plans. There is an issue I would like to mention about the improvement of my future lesson plans at Kindergarten Level, which has to do with avoiding repeating the same sentence structures in different lesson plans of a Didactic Unit, in order to innovate and follow a certain cohesion and coherence between the lesson plans.
To sum up, I may say that I found this experience very challenging and important for my learning process, which made me grow academically and I learnt a lot of new things in relation to teaching at Kindergarten Level.
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