Learning Environment
How do we as teachers facilitate your child’s growth during the preschool year?
- Giving each child unconditional love with smiles, friendly words, encouragement and care
- Showing each child respect by considering her/his opinions and validating feelings
- Being a good listener
- Providing limits that are reasonable and understandable to the children to create a safe place
- Giving opportunity to succeed and build confidence, being sure the tasks are challenging and not frustrating
- Helping each child be responsible, giving her/him the tools to do her/his own “task”
- Providing opportunities to make choices (e.g. “Would you like to play in the rice table or do a puzzle?”)
- Developing problem-solving skills, giving guidance while children work out their own problem
- Knowing the individual needs of each child through a good knowledge of child development, working at meeting areas of growth through planning appropriate activities
- Encouraging some risk taking. Young children develop healthy attitudes about themselves in environments that accept them as they are, allowing them to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes without being required to meet adult standards of excellence
- Celebrating accomplishments – one step at a time.
- Encouraging and supporting children’s differences and uniqueness
- Viewing all experiences as valuable opportunities for growth
- Talking with the children using conversation that encourages rather than judges (i.e. judging – “I like your painting” vs encouraging – “It looks like you worked a long time on your painting and chose many different colors.”)
- Asking open-ended questions that help children become critical thinkers. (i.e. What do you think will happen? How might you fix it?)
