Teach English in Nurimu Zhen - Tongliao Shi

In college I studied elementary education. In the final year of my studies, I spent a month in Madrid, Spain working with an experienced teacher teaching English to three-, four-, and five-year-old children. When I first started working with her, I was surprised that she spoke entirely in English to the students during a lesson when the students all spoke Spanish. We would visit each classroom for a thirty-minute lesson where we would sing songs, look at pictures and practice vocabulary words. The students would then color a picture that had to do with the vocabulary they were learning. While the students were coloring she would go around and give attention to each student. After working with her for a few days, I saw how her lessons were very organized and routine to the students and she was a very warm teacher whom the students loved. Because of the structure of her lessons and her relationships with the students, it was fine that she spoke entirely in English. Even though they didn’t necessarily understand everything she said, they knew what to expect and were comfortable with her. After my experience in Spain, I student taught in a second-grade classroom in Spokane, Washington. My master teacher was also very organized and her days were very structured. She had great rapport with the students and truly cared about each of them. Because of her relationship with her students, they were very well-behaved and excited to learn. The kids were comfortable in her classroom and always eager to participate because they knew what was expected of them and they felt safe in the welcoming classroom environment the teacher provided. In my first year of teaching I taught in a small town in Idaho, where my mom also taught. She was a second-grade teacher and I taught third-grade. Because of this, I had heard about many of my students before they came to my classroom. What I learned through that experience was a teacher needs to meet students without any preconceived ideas of what they will be like. While a student might have been difficult for a teacher the year before, that doesn’t mean the student will be difficult in your classroom. It is important to build community in your classroom before you dive into teaching. I had many students with difficult home lives, but I worked to build a welcoming environment in my classroom where students felt safe to share and explore. When my classroom was organized and structured, students knew what to expect. After teaching in Idaho, I moved to Seattle, Washington where I substitute taught. That was a difficult experience at first because I wasn’t able to build rapport with students as I was only in a class for a day or two before moving on to teach a different class. Also, I was using someone else’s curriculum and not my own. After a few months of substitute teaching, I came up with simple activities I could do to start my day that would help build rapport with students even though my time with them was limited. Now I am a preschool teacher in Denver, Colorado. Students come to my class when they are three-years-old and are with me until they go to kindergarten. I really like that I can have students for two or three years because we are able to build a relationship and I can learn so much about them. I am able to use their interests to plan my curriculum and we have learned so much more together that if I only had them for nine months and then they moved on. In summary, my personal teaching experience has taught me the importance of building relationships with students and also being organized and structured in my classroom. I follow a daily routine, but because of the relationships I build with my students we are able to do so much more and when they feel comfortable in my classroom, we can deviate from the routine to explore new and exciting things that interest them.