Making of a Preschool Teacher - A Comprehensive Guide | EdMonks

becoming the most desirable preschool teacher whom every school want to hire

Preschool Teacher Guide

This guide has been written to help three kinds of people

• a fresher who wants to become an ace preschool teacher

• a school leader who wants to help her/his preschool teachers become better

• a parent who has a foundational stage child (3 to 8 years)

Here is the structure of the guide

Chapter 1

You are important

Forget about the senior teachers, in some schools, even school nannies have more worth than preschool teachers.

It is a typical case of lost leadership

In my opinion, preschool teachers are the most important staff of any school. If you have any doubts, just go through the following points

• We all know that no building can stand without a solid foundation, likewise, education at the foundational stage is utmost important

• At the foundational stage, children do not know expression, language, and information processing and that is why we need the best of all to manage these years

• The brain size is growing at the fastest rate, the neurons are being made at the fastest rate, change of environment is happening for the child at the fastest rate and you need the best to manage this rate

• That is why all the educated parents circle, they know that good early education is expensive, and the rest of the parents need education

I learned this lesson the hard way from Namrita Rathee.

When I had an opportunity to host her as a guest speaker at India Habitat Center on my first School Influence Interconnect, a community of doers in school innovation.

You can see her sitting in the center of this photograph

When I said in her introduction “despite her being absolutely charismatic, she prefers to be called just as an early educator”, she corrected me by saying “not just an early educator but a proud early educator”

When you are starting your career as an early educator, you should be proud of being one.

Chapter 2

How to start

You just need to start with two things

• What do you want to learn

• and from whom you will learn

This edition of my newsletter will help you to get a sense of the first point, however, for the second, I will recommend you to start searching these topics on YouTube and find a suitable person, whom you can understand and who knows the stuff.

Note - YouTube can be your best friend in this new journey of improvement.

What to learn

I will always recommend you start with Rhymes, Poems & Songs. I find most educators do not even know the difference between the three.

I believe every early years educator should know at least 50 to 100 rhymes at the least and you need to go beyond ‘Johny Johny’ and ‘Twinkle Twinkle’

I tried a hand at a school that I was consulting and in just a week, students did this

You see remembering the rhyme is just one of the step

the core step is to sing it so that you can teach them

• rhythm

• tone

• and pitch and much more.

You are developing a new kind of intelligence in children

Have you ever heard of a school Choir?

like this

or this

They cannot do such a thing without this intelligence. rhythm, tone, and pitch.

You may also look for classroom engagement ideas

There is no other person better than Dr Jene who connects songs and rhymes with classroom engagement

Not only her, there are many other amazing preschool educators on youtube who would suggest the usage of songs for classroom engagement.

Chapter 3

Level-up your Game

Once you have explored the ideas of Rhymes and Songs and the classroom engagement, you are ready to enter the classroom.

But wait, there are many other things that may level up your skills to manage the preschool classroom, such as

Phonics

If you are serious about improving the reading skills of your students, Phonics is unequivocally the first thing to pick up.

The magic of Phonics was shown to me by a friend Shweta Maheshwari when her 4-year-old son read a book flawlessly.

I wanted to share a detailed video here and I feel lucky that I discovered this Phonics workshop video for the pre-primary

The key presenter here is Binal Desai and I think, this looked like the most appropriate video to give a detailed introduction to the concept of phonics

In my view, she has shown an amazing blend of a leader, educator, public speaker, and marketer, It was perfect. I kind of became a fan of her

Explore Phonics more and more. and once your children can read, you can introduce them to Reading for Joy.

Do share your thoughts and experiences in the comments around reading in preprimary.

When I finish writing an edition of my newsletter, I submit it to my inner circle, a group of people who give me feedback before I publish it.

My younger sister Deepa Mishra is also a part of this inner circle and she asked me to add

Blends, Diagraphs Trigraphs

Although it is a part of phonics only, I realized the importance of mentioning it separately and I searched for a suitable video.

Luckily I got this amazing work by Kirti Bhalla

The next thing that I want to include here comes with the courtesy of my friend Akanksha Arora. She introduced me to the concept of

Print-Rich Environment

The idea is to enable the classroom with text so that children do not just use their image-processing skills to learn things, but can also associate text with it

She told me about various ingredients of it like

• Concept of the Whole language - How to make sure to include text as an integral part

• Display with text - How using text at various places can be important, for example, if you put the text ‘CHAIR’ at a chair or ‘TABLE’ at a table.

• Display stories - You can display stories where you display text.

• Sight words wall - Every preschool educator should know the concept of Sight Words and making a wall for them is almost always a welcome move for the class.

• Theme Labeling - You can also use various themes to the label text.

NEP 2020 talks about Foundational Literacy and Numeracy. This can be an amazing way to improve FLN.

Next is a very strong idea without which I cannot imagine a preschool classroom is

Circle Time

This is a very amazing mechanism to connect with children and to let them learn things in a personalized way.

Explore more videos, but definitely have a look at this one.

Motor Skills

Nothing disturbs me more about a preschool teacher than her/his ignorance about Gross and Fine Motor skills.

While I am still trying to find a good video on the topic, meanwhile you can have a look at this video to get an idea.

NOTE - If you will watch the above video of phonics by Binal, you will get to learn a great deal about motor skills,

You may also have a look at this video to learn how to help students to improve upon these skills

If you are liking this newsletter so far, why don’t you just share it with your friends?

Tactics to engage your Class Better

For absolute beginners, this particular video can be an amazing start to structure their class better.

and if you want to make it a little better, Just have a look at this video

Chapter 4

Advanced work

Now when it comes to the advanced level understanding of becoming a better preschool teacher

This is the space, where I will need to add a lot of things. But the very first thing that I would recommend you to start with would be to have a look at various education philosophies like

Montessori, Waldorf & Reggio

Maria Montessori is not an alien name to almost any educator now. But if you have not gone through its long official training, probably you do not know a thing about it

So I tried to find an interview that can help you understand this whole concept a little better.

and in the same way, you may have a look at this video to understand Waldorf's philosophy

Reggio Emilia's Approach is another famous way of preschool education. You will love to learn the idea of the 100 languages of children.

NOTE - All my guides are dynamic and I keep adding stuff here whenever I get something interesting.

So do share your thoughts in the comments so that I can improve this guide for better.