Teach English in HaimenshilinjiAngxinqu - Nantong Shi

In last October I started working on a private kindergarten in a fast-growing city in China, called 太仓 (Taicang). This kindergarten is called Giraffe. Nowadays Giraffe already have two campus and it is on their way to open the third campus. I must admit I was surprised, on a positive way, the first time I entered my work place. It is a professional, fast paced , organized institution focus on creating an English environment for kids aged from 4 years old to 14 years old. The environment is colorful and cheerful and for sure I envy this nowadays kids opportunity, because as a non-native my classes were on a grey classroom with not that many props and technology was still emerging on my country public classrooms back on that time. A brief glimpse of what Giraffe method is. It is a well-organized division between English levels, divided in three major categories. The first are mini giraffes kids with ages between 3 and 4 years old. The second are the B courses, and these courses are mainly for kids with the ages between 3 and 9. And last is the C courses, with kids comprehended between 8 and 14 years old. So for mini giraffes there are no materials, it is exactly what I consider a kindergarten because the kids are so young they cannot start to form ideas about a language, we cannot explain nothing and the main purpose is for the kids start parroting the teachers basic words. The class plan for this mini giraffe it is pretty simple just start with a warm up that will raise the kids spirit, using the known simple songs and then make a lot of playful activities so we can get some attention spans of 2 mins ,the most, and with that time make the students understand, memorize and output 3 to 4 key words. For B classes there are some divisions in this category, the B courses can be divided between B1 to B6 and each course have the syllabus for 120 hours course that will last for around 1 year. As mentioned, the kids would be around 3 to 9 years old so the classes are 1 hour and half tops, and they follow exactly this routine – Warm up, we show a simple English song and drill the main vocabs and make the kids sing along. Presentation- period of time we present the content to our kids. Production- period of time that we ask the students to output. So, it follows the warm up, presentation and production mentioned on this course. Last we have the C course with the students between 9 and 14 years old. Each course have the syllabus for 120 hours course that will last for around 1 year, same as B courses, however the classes last for 3 hours and this category also is divided between C1 to C6. Nowadays I have two classes on the C1 level and this level focus on the student phonics, they believe it is a good age to teach the Chinese students the English phonics because now they already have some experience with their mother tongue and teaching the English phonics when they are 8 years old allows them to already form a maturity with the pin yin phonics and will not confound the students. The classes also follow the plan of warm up/ presentation and production but on this stage the production goes to a different level because the students are motivated to fill some easy task sheets and also start some monitored writing. About the C2 to C5 I took part in some of my colleague classes and on this level it allows the teachers to push them to form some sentence patterns as well as some grammar. What is the aim of the teacher in a kindergarten was the question that came to my mind when I first took a C1 class, what now? What should be my pace for these 8 years old, on average, kids. What would they be capable of after the 120 hours of my course? Well as my managers put it- I was overthinking it, also because I have heard stories about bilingual kids with 7 or 8 years old, and so that became my objective for my kids. After one month with them I realized that it was nonsense. First as this course mentioned in some of the units, it is about the students and not about my teaching skills. What I took from this experience is the kindergarten function as premeasure learning stage for these kids, what they need is to have fun while learning the language and if they do they most likely will feel comfortable using the English language on the future. That it is a main goal for a teacher in a kindergarten. If the kids keep coming willingly to your class and they still remember most of the vocabs and sentence patterns previously learned, then it is a sign you are doing a good job. I have shared my experience on this summative task to shown that I have been through an amazing experience on a very organized teaching business on a foreigner country, I might had changed the school name to avoid any kind of problems.