There are many thoughts on how to teach reading, I'm not going to go into all the different ideas and theories on how to teach reading. While they all work in some capacity I can guarantee that teaching reading by first teaching phonics is the best way! Give me a 3 year old with no knowledge of English and by the end of the year I'll have them reading simple phonics books. Okay, teach phonics first you say, but how? Once again there are many different ideas, but they're all wrong! Many will tell you to first teach the sounds b,p,t,d. I can understand why, they're the easiest sounds, but that ..read more

  A big thanks to feedspot for not only liking the blog, but also including it in their list of top 35 preschool blogs. If you want to check out the rest of their list you can find the link below. https://blog.feedspot.com/preschool_blogs ..read more

  Teaching as a profession has a lot of people that think they can do it or how you can improve. I'm going to leave the internet experts alone today and focus on the subset of managers and educators that write, but don't teach. In a previous school I had a manger who was very well read on educational theories. He always had new ideas he wanted us to try and because he spent a lot of time reading he believed that this would make himself quite capable of teaching a classroom of students. It took one teacher needing a day off and him subbing the class for it to come painfully obvious that ..read more

A big question for any new Pre-School is how to respond to a child saying they love you? Eventually after a while of teaching your class your students will grow so close to you that they may start to tell you they love you. For children it's natural to tell the people they feel comfortable and safe with they love them. They may see you as much as they see their parents and for some children maybe more. A good teacher will make them feel cared about, safe, comfortable to try new things all the things their parents do so naturally the child starts to feel a lot of positive emotions towards you ..read more

  Should your school / class have an exercise time? Is it an important part of the school day or week? My first school had exercise time every morning. It was sold to the teachers as important to get the students moving to help them wake up for the school day. However, it was also held outside in the heat of summer. Afterwards students and teachers would be hot and sweaty and need to spend the next 20 minutes cooling off. Any suggestion that we should have exercise time inside with the A.C was laughed at as a silly idea. My next school didn't have exercise time and I can say for a fact t ..read more

 This blog aims to help preschool ESL teachers ..read more

  Paley's Story Telling Curriculum is one of the first teaching philosophies I really read a lot about. In the same vain as learn while playing philosophies Paley presents the idea that all children learn innately through story telling. Using it to help make understanding of the world around them and to express their own idea of how things work. Paley would allow students to volunteer to tell her a story. She would write it down in front of them confirming she was writing it down correctly. Afterwards all the children would sit down on the mat and the story teller could p ..read more

  Positive reinforcement is so critical in a teaching environment. Most ESL teachers would already have some type of reward system and so already provide positive reinforcement. A big follow up question is what does that reward system give the student? Just points/smiley faces/stars for the sake of having the most. Competition is always a motivating factor for children, so it can work, but don't be surprised to find eventually the students no longer care. Giving out some sort of tangible reward is great. But the reward needs to be something the students want. While students want candy ..read more

  Previously, I wrote that one of the most important aspects of online teaching is entertaining the students. After 4 weeks of teaching online I want to highlight that the element of fun in your online teaching is CRITICAL to your class. If you want to keep students in your class or even recruit new students it has to be enjoyable. If a parent has to be sitting beside the student the whole time. Telling them to pay attention and repeat after the teacher. That student is doing to drop out or not sign up. The child doesn't enjoy the class and you've given an already stressed parent anot ..read more

  “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”  - Charles Darwin Covid has changed the world and how some of us have to teach. We can  no longer stand in front of our students and teach them. We need to teach through a computer. This new method of delivery requires a new way of teaching. Those teachers that just teach their online lesson as they would their stand up lesson are not going to be as effective as those that adapt to this new world. One of the first things you should do is decide what your ai ..read more