Day 8

Finally I managed to observe Mrs K's K1 class for the entire day today. From her, I learnt quite a fair bit about classroom management. For instance, she has a silence exercise whereby she makes the children keep quiet for 50 seconds so as to calm all the children down before moving on to the next activity.

Besides, she is also creative in her morning exercises as she would sometimes add in new movements in her exercise routine to get the children excited, such as the fishermen casting the net action.

For the writing exercises, the children continued on the words that they have learnt yesterday. They also did a worksheet that allows them to draw out the number that is stated. For instance, if given the number 8, it means that the child has to draw out 8 cones/smiling faces/flowers. As usual, when given the standard set of instructions, children always love to deviate. They would ask the teacher whether they are allowed to draw angry or sad faces instead of smiling faces.

In addition, I had a long chat with Mrs K ,who was very willing to share about her experience. According to her, the most important thing a kindergarten teacher ought to do is to practise diplomacy towards the children's parents. It is crucial for a teacher to try to get to know parents as quickly as possible and build up a good relationship such that the parents would not try to pick on you, especially if the child tells tales to their parents. She also mentioned about a few children in her class. For instance, the parents of the child with special needs in her class seem to be in denial of their child's situation and refuse to admit. In addition, there is a boy, E, who went home and started cursing vulgarity. E's mum was shocked and upset and came over to the school to demand an explanation, pushing the blame to the children who are interacting with E and claiming that they are the ones who taught E those vulgarities. Upon further investigation, Mrs K realized that it was actually E who taught the rest of the children vulgarities and politely gotten back to E's mum that E is the one who is using the most vulgarities in the class. That statement got her quiet.

Other than learning how to deal with both classroom situation and parents, Mrs K also shared with me about some storybook telling ideas. Apparently, there is a Japanese storybook telling method, known as Kamishibai. It is pretty interesting as the set consists of large pictures with the story written at the back of the cardboard. This allows the teachers to engage the interest of the children while reading out the story to them. Perhaps I would check it out soon.