The 1st training week of being an English teacher of kids
Previously
COVID-19 PEAK
After graduated from the university, I went to Australia for 1-year working holiday. Due to Coronavirus, I was forced to go back to my country. It was time for me to look for a job. Thank god Taiwan was one of the safest countries in the world when COVID-19 cases reach peak, thus everything were still working as usual. People went to schools as normal, went to work as normal, and walked on the street as normal…well, of course with masks.
SEARCHING FOR A JOB?
Come back to the topic, I sit in front my laptop surfing on the job seeker page. I knew I was interested in learning languages, so I started to search for the job related to my hobbies then. However, I got only 2 responses after sending hundreds of my resumes. One is curriculum adviser, which turned out to be a salesperson(A lie~~), while the other one is English teacher of children. Thus, I stepped into English-teaching field accidentally.
I AM SHY. CAN I DO THIS JOB WELL?
To be honest, I did have experience in teaching(I was an instrument teacher), but I’d never taught kids, so I was like “I am shy. Can I do this job well?”
Grab the chance
WHY NOT?
Fortunately, I passed the interview and the company provided me half year training(with salary). After 3 months training in Taiwan, I will be sent to Shanghai and keep training for 3 to 4 months. Once I pass the training, I will work in China.
Instead of being frustrated with such a long training period, I am happy that they are willing to give a zero-experience youngster a chance and also provide a systematic training. Further more, I am still young and there will be enough time to think about my future if I am not interested in this job in the future. In a good way, I can earn the experience, and also find out the different working environment between Taiwan and China, so…why not?
First week of training
In the first week, I had to know how the whole company worked, so I also needed to deal with administration tasks. Plus, I needed to inspect and learn from the other teacher’s courses, to know how to prepare the lesson, and how to teach kids. Every day I should hand over my reflection to show what I learnt from the courses.
What I learn
1. Make class rules
This is the most important thing teachers have to do. Because all kids are energetic and uncontrollable, we need to make specific rules to maintain discipline. For example, raise your hand before speaking, sit nicely, and don’t speak Chinese… Through this, kids will know what is the right thing to do and they will remind each others as well.
2. Make kids be quick on the uptake
As a teacher, when we teach our students the content of the textbook, we can also use this chance to rewind kids’ memories and ask them to give us some similar examples.
For example：
We have to put a question mark (?) after all the question sentences, could you please give me some sentences you need to put question mark after…
3. Use interesting pictures & different colors to emphasize
Kids love interesting pictures and they are sensitive to the colors. They will ask questions if they think the picture is not corresponded with the normal situation, for example, a blue tiger.
Also, we can use different color to emphasize the easy make mistakes, for example, this is an eraser and this is a white eraser.
4. From group to individual
While playing a game, we can first ask all people one question, and then separate them into 2 groups to compete, and then ask 2 groups to send one person at one time to the front and compete again. Through this way, we can find out those who get left behind so that we can put more efforts on these students.
5. Manage the time
There are 4 steps (4P) when it comes to teach a course, “Warm-up”, “Presentation”, “Production” and “Wrap-up”. These should be considered when we are writing the lesson plan.
