Early Childhood Education: Kindergarten Reflection

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Kindergarten Reflection Entering my kindergarten teaching experience in the last quarter of school year I had to quickly become familiar with kindergarten content standards and the school’s curriculum. To do this I observed my mentor teachers instructional time with the children and gained as much information as I could about the children’s educational standing by developing a professional relationship with the my mentor teacher and the children. I learned that the majority of my kindergarten children had not previously attended preschool and that this was their first year of school. I found that interacting with the children in social activities provided me with great insight to their literacy, math, science, and social studies development. In reviewing the children’s class projects, school displays, and an array of their work sample along with my mentor teachers year-long assessments I was able to recognize challenging, emerging and advanced content areas of the children’s core curriculum. These emerging and challenging content areas is what I centered my curriculum planning around. “Information about each child’s learning and development is used to evaluate teaching effectiveness. This may lead to changes in schedule, curriculum and teaching strategies, room set up, resources, and so on.” (Bredekamp and Copple, p. 249) This experience as a whole provided me with the opportunity to show my professional quality as an educator, a cooperative team member, and a lifelong learner. A few things that I continuously had to reflect on throughout this experience was my self-competence, my performance as well as the children’s, and of course my professional demeanor which directly impacted the effectiveness of my planning, teaching and... ... middle of paper ... ...l of mine is to request frequent feedback on my performance and lesson plans. This quarter in kindergarten my mentor teacher provided little to no feedback on my lesson plans which lead me to believe they were sound when they actually could have been tweaked a bit more to fit my mentor teachers instructional approaches and the children’s way thinking. I will also need to pay closer attention to dates, deadlines and my performance expectations. I often found myself mixed up with dates which are a critical in our short time spent in practicum. Even though I had some rough encounters with my kindergarten experience I felt I learned a great deal about professionalism, patience and working with children developing on varying levels. Overall, my practicum experiences were supportive of my course learning and greatly appreciated. Works Cited Early Childhood Expereinces

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