Strategies For Early Childhood Teachers
Summary:
With the educational landscape rapidly changing in the classroom, be sure that you are equipped as a teacher to provide the best educational instruction to your students.
If you’re an early childhood teacher, you want to be sure that you keep abreast of how you can be an effective teacher in the 21st century. With all the changing technologies occurring continually, it’s wise for teachers to provide an education environment that fosters problem-solving, creativity, social responsibility, critical thinking, and global awareness. As you move forward in your career, let’s discuss five ways you prepare your students for their futures successfully.
Lean Toward Technology
Much of the youth becomes tech savvy at an early age, with many of them perhaps being more tech savvy than teachers. Moving forward, it is important that you keep abreast of new technologies and integrate such into the classroom regularly. Learn the lingo of technology and speak about it with the class. Help the children tap into their technical skills and provide a wide range of tools that will assist them in learning what they’ll need to know to be more successful in their future.
Setting Realistic Goals
Teach the children to set realistic goals for themselves. This allows them to learn how to be responsible for their lives, whether it’s at school or at home. Introduce them to resources that assist them in setting goals and creating action plans geared toward accomplishing them. You can begin with simple goal setting strategies and use lists, charts, and organizers for resources. As they work toward or accomplish their goals, give them a good dose of encouragement and support.
Cater to Learning Styles
Children tend to have various learning styles, so tailor their learning experiences based upon each one individually. For example, one student may learn better by watching something and another student may be more inclined to learn by reading. You’ll find that children prefer one of three main learning styles: auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. As you learn your students’ preferred styles, offer choices based upon each style
Use a Student-centered Approach
Keep in mind that using a student-centered approach to teaching works quite well at times. What this means is that you allow your students to lead and interact with each other, creating rich conversation that helps them learn more about a topic and themselves. Using group discussions works quite well at letting the students be free to interact and engage. As the teacher, you take on more the role as facilitator.
Teach Multiple Subjects at One Time
Feel free to combine subjects like math and science as opposed to approaching each subject individually. To accomplish cross-curriculum teaching, using projects is an effective way to go, with problem-solving tasks being introduced. Use real life problems and ask the students to create effective solutions as a group in order to encourage collaboration and respect.
As an early childhood teacher, you get to give the gift of knowledge and wisdom to children year after year. Use these tips to further your work as a teacher. If you’re in need of an online CDA certificate course, you can easily earn your certificate online with Ashworth College. Go ahead and get started today.