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Essay / Early Childhood Education: Reflecting on Kindergarten
Reflecting on Kindergarten Entering my kindergarten teaching experience during the last quarter of the school year, I had to quickly become familiar with the standards kindergarten content and school curriculum. To do this, I observed my mentor teacher's teaching time with the children and gained as much information as possible about the children's educational level by developing a professional relationship with my mentor teacher and the children. I learned that the majority of my kindergartners had never been to preschool and this was their first year of school. I have found that interacting with children in social activities has given me great insight into their development in literacy, math, science, and social studies. By reviewing the children's class projects, school exhibits, and a range of their work samples as well as my mentor teachers' assessments throughout the year, I was able to recognize challenging, emerging, and advanced content areas of the basic program for children. It is these emerging and challenging content areas that I have focused my program planning on. “Information about each child’s learning and development is used to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching. This may result in changes to schedules, curricula and teaching strategies, room configurations, resources, etc. (Bredekamp and Copple, p. 249)This entire experience gave me the opportunity to demonstrate my professional qualities as an educator, cooperative team member, and lifelong learner. A few things that I continually had to reflect on throughout this experience were my personal competence, my performance as well as that of the children, and of course my professional behavior which had a direct impact on the effectiveness of my planning, my teaching and...... middle of document... One of my tasks is to request frequent feedback on my performance and lesson plans. This term in kindergarten, my mentor teacher provided little to no feedback on my lesson plans, leading me to believe they were solid when they could have been modified a little more to accommodate to the teaching approaches of my mentor teachers and the children's way of thinking. I will also need to pay closer attention to dates, deadlines, and my performance expectations. I often found myself embroiled in dates that are crucial in our short time spent on internship. Although my kindergarten experience was difficult, I felt that I learned a lot about professionalism, patience, and working with children who were developing at different levels. Overall, my internship experiences supported my learning of the course and were greatly appreciated.