When new teachers decide to start teaching abroad they usually have preconceived ideas about the students they will be teaching. Some of us prefer a certain age to teach over others. Some of us are okay with any and all ages. But it’s those times when you’re expecting to teach to a certain age group, and have mentally prepared yourself for such, but are then given the opposite ages of what you hoped and expected. It’s
during these times that we have to think on our feet, become familiar with the unknown and break down our comfort barriers to become the best teachers we know we can be. For this article, I’m going to focus on the obstacles of becoming a first time kindergarten English teacher.

Shift Your Focus

Kindergarten students are some of my favorite students to teach, but this idea is not often so popular amongst the new teacher community. While smaller students are fun to play with it’s the older students that can provide the visual and language growth that teachers want to see to help validate their skill and lessons. With older students you can have mini-conversations with them and get to know them on a more personal level. Those kinds of things are hard to do with kinder students without a teaching assistant or knowledge of their native language. But not being able to hold a basic conversation with four and five year olds in English shouldn’t deter teachers away from this amazingly bright age group. Instead of focusing on what the students can say, kinder teachers should focus on what the students can understand. Being able to give directions to a kinder student and having them follow and do without hesitation is one gesture that proves their little minds are working well with the English language. Expecting a child that is still in the beginning works of learning their own language to all of a sudden be able to produce full sentences in a second language is a high standard. So dropping that standard down to making sure students can point to or pick up an item that you say to them is a major accomplishment, and one that can be easily measured given enough time with your students.

Tips for a Successful Kindergarten Teaching

For some teachers, the turn off of teaching Kinders isn’t due to their cognitive development as much as it’s their maturity levels. Little kids are full of energy and emotions, two things that can make some teachers, understandably, uncomfortable. There are tips and tricks to getting kinder students to use their energy in a positive way and to distract them from getting too emotional. Making age appropriate games that last no more than eight minutes is key. The most productive games that Kinders need to learn with are games that involve touching, picking up, moving or doing crafts. These games don’t have to be a ‘new creation’ either! A good activity is to put flashcards around the room, draw or show animals to the children and ask them to pretend to be that animal. Once the students have mimicked each animal, say a flashcard or word that’s around the room with an animal and have the students, and yourself, walk to that flashcard as the animal while saying the word. Simple, fun, and it’s teaching the students the target vocabulary as well as extra words because of the introduction of animals. It’s a win, win situation that takes little to no effort on the teacher’s part. And to see how cute the students are when they get the chance to play and pretend to be an animal will warm even the coldest of hearts.

Interactive Classroom Activities

Getting students up and moving while being silly will help with the excess energy they have but doing crafts will allow students to excel in their own personal ways. This is where curbing the emotional side of them takes place. Allowing students to do something hands on, like coloring or creating an animal masks, you’re getting the children to settle down and show you their creative side. Attaching these projects to a book, vocabulary, or songs that you just learned together as a class will help solidify the target language in their heads. Not only did they just learn colors, they learned how to make a paper plate rainbow!
Crafts are a great tool to help ensure that the students at least attempt to continue their English skills outside of the classroom. When they leave your class with a craft they will more than likely want to tell their parents as soon as they step out the door. The parents, in return, will ask the students to tell them about their craft using the English words that they learned with it. This is giving the student practice outside the classroom that will only develop into a stronger understanding of the language inside the classroom.

Rewards of Teaching Kindergartners

I know most of us, as new teachers, crave the understanding and speaking level of older students but that shouldn’t make us want to shy away from those students that are just learning the basics. With time, patience, and a lot of activities, kinder students can turn out to be some of the best students you’ve ever had the pleasure of teaching. And depending on how long you stick with your school, seeing that development as the months and years go on is a very enriching experience. Plus, how do you think those older students became so confident and knowledgeable of the English language? A good kinder teacher taught them their basics.

Teaching abroad can be a stressful endeavor but the best way to counteract that stress is to travel and see the sights that are offered to you. Some people like to take vacations to neighboring countries or provinces but your great escape doesn’t always have to been expensive. You can find fun and adventurous places in your own community! Not only will these gems give you a glimpse into your local city’s history, it will also help you appreciate the culture of the locals. These spots can range from mountain paths and national parks to inner city temples and museums. Finding these spots may be rough but there are some steps you can take to help you find the perfect downtime entertainment close to you.

The Internet

Since we live in digital age where there’s an abundant of information available at the tips of our fingers it’s not hard to realize that the internet could be your best friend in this search. Doing a quick search of the town your living in will give you some key places and ideas of what to look for in your city. If you city is known for a certain kind of architectural structure then you can probably count on there being some old, famous buildings that people view as a tourist attraction.
Does your city have a certain kind of tree, or plant, that is native to that region? Then there is probably a national park that encases some of the oldest versions of that beautiful greenery. Doing research on your new home will help familiarize yourself to the city but will also help to keep an eye out for some leisure and sightseeing opportunities that it has to offer.

Local Friends

During our time abroad we create two new groups of friends: other foreign friends from around the Western speaking world and local friends who we’ve met on the streets of our city.
These local friends are usually people wanting to practice, or willing to learn, our language in order to get to know us and our cultural. These friends are one in a million! Not only can they direct you to the best food spots in the city but they can also tell you about the local’s favorite leisure spots that might have been left out of the tourists guides online.

Let Your Students Become the Teacher

Sometimes making local friends can take time and a lot of our time can be solely devoted to our students and our teaching. This is not a bad thing and can also be useful in the long run. Depending on the age of the students, you can ask them what some fun things are to do around the city. You can even make it into a lesson where they have to explain to a foreigner (you!) the best attractions, museums, parks, or sights in their home city and why they should go there. You’ll get a great background of all the places they suggest as well as recommendations on where to spend your next free weekend and they’ll get a great English lesson out of it.

Get Out and Explore!

Coming to your new city doesn’t have to be your only adventure and saving up for a trip to another country may be expensive, regardless of how close you are to it.
Using these ideas to help find those tucked away spots will help build a relationship with the locals, your students, and with your adventurous self. Plus, finding local areas to explore will be the best decision because it allows you to appreciate the beauty that is in your own backyard.

Confidence is Key!

Teaching for the first time can be an exciting, yet stressful, experience. No matter what training you’ve taken to prepare yourself the thought of teaching in front of a classroom of children, or adults, can cause trepidation. Questions of doubt will start to enter your mind but all of these questions can be put to rest by building, and focusing on, your confidence in the classroom. How do you achieve this confidence? First, you must remind yourself that you are a native English speaker! This fact alone should help put to ease those worries about teaching proper grammar and vocabulary. Your students are coming to your class to learn from an expert, and that’s you! You already know more than they do so take this knowledge and run with it!

Second, to help with your confidence in class it’s always best to have a lesson plan made of what you want to teach that day. Include details of the activities you’ll be doing, materials needed for those activities, the time it should take to complete those activities, as well as back up activities if your timing goes faster than expected. Then, take the lesson plans into class with you! It’s not a bad thing to have a reminder of the structure of the class at your fingertips. Having good lesson plans accessible during class will help ease the pressures of being a new teacher. Keep yourself prepared and you’ll see your confidence build.

Lastly, have fun! English is a boring, and sometime difficult, language to study (unless you majored in it, then… woohoo English!) so we need to make our classes as fun and entertaining as possible. Adding games into the lesson, whether our students are adults or children, will help not only with enlivening the atmosphere but it will also help with students’ retention of the material. Seeing your students deliver language during a game, and having fun with it, will also build your confidence in what activities you choose to do in your class. Plus, the more fun your students have in your class, the more they will enjoy coming to your class. In the end, no matter how you conduct your lesson, your students will appreciate you because you’re taking time out of your life to teach them a skill they deem important. So remember to be you, smile, and have fun with your students!

Resources are Your New Best Friend

Trying to figure out how to create a good lesson plan and what materials to use can be an exhausting task. But even the most experienced teachers come to roadblocks when figuring out good lessons to teach their students. This is where finding good resources comes in handy. Good resources can range from talking to other teachers, looking around online at ESL websites (like this one!), to reading books about teaching. But never think that you are alone in this endeavor. The teaching community is a vast community filled with all different kinds of educators with different personalities, teaching methods, and classroom ideas that may suit you perfectly. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or ask someone to point you in the right direction to find additional help. We all get stuck sometimes but the best way to get unstuck is to get an outside, unbiased opinion or idea.

When In Doubt, Drinking Game It Out!

Even when finding resources we, as teachers, often wonder if that idea, game, or activity will be good enough to put into practice in our own classrooms. It never hurts to try. The worst thing to come out of a “failed” activity is having students practice speaking more, and that’s still a really good result! If you start to find yourself not liking activities that you find then don’t be afraid to attempt to make your own! If you do attempt to make one on your own, remember you’re not trying to re-invent the wheel! The simplest of activities can be some of the best language producing, and entertaining, activities for your students. My personal approach when thinking of new games is to revamp my favorite drinking games into phonics, vocabulary, or grammar games. These are the easiest ones to make, in my opinion, because you (potentially) already know the rules and game set up, now replace the alcohol with spelling, writing, or speaking and, voila!, you’ve got yourself a fun, new production activity for your next class!

In the end, don’t worry about being a new teacher. All teachers have been new to the field at one point or another and we know how it feels to have doubt, anxiety, and fear. With time it will become natural and you will find yourself passing on these beginner tips to the next rookie teachers coming into your school.

Moving abroad for the first time, especially to China, can be a very daunting, but exciting, experience. It takes a lot of courage to pack up your life into a suitcase and say goodbye to everything that you know and love. The anticipation and excitement of starting a new journey usually begins once you have booked a flight to your new temporary “home.” One’s mind tend to wander and fantasize about the exotic culture, weird yet delicious foods, and brand new scenery that could be foreign to you, the foreigner! Although most of those thoughts are alluring, it’s important to remember the reality of the situation at hand. Moving to a new city is stressful enough but you’re about to be moving half way around the world! Once you’ve made your commitment doing more research of the city where you will be living will be a step in the right direction to making your transition as smooth as possible. Some need to know facts would be things like: weather, primary language, city size, and popular sites in the area. All of these items will help you to not only plan your new life in the city but to pack as well!

There’s No Place Like “Home”

Once you’ve done all the reading about your new city that you can stand, and have packed all the items you can’t live without while you’re here (yes, your teddy bear counts) it’s time to actually get here! The plane ride, is usually the hardest, but all will be rewarded when you land in your first Chinese airport and realize that you’re definitely not in Kansas anymore. The blustery chit-chat of locals filling the terminal all around you will be a bit overwhelming but don’t worry, because they’ll probably stop the talking once they spot you. Depending on your city, foreigners are a fascinating sight in China and they’re often amazed at seeing us in their city. On some occasions locals will approach you in hopes of starting a friendly conversation, and possibly a selfie, too, whether it be in English or in their native tongue. If they approach you in their language they will more than likely realize that you’re very new and have yet to learn how to communicate with them beyond common pleasantries. This is okay! Sometimes they might even try to teach you some useful words! Take these interactions to heart and use them as a reminder to try and learn the local language to show your gratitude and appreciation, not only for their culture, but for their hospitality. After a couple of months of adjustment and subconsciously learning you will soon realize that this new city, as vastly different as it may seem, has become your new “home” and you wouldn’t trade it for any other city in China.

Communication is Key

In order to get that “hometown” feel you need to try your hardest to assimilate into the culture in which you’ve jumped head first. Bringing over language learning books, downloading podcasts, buying language learning software, or just going on language exchanges are a few ways of introducing yourself to the local language. Being able to communicate is essential to an easy, and successful, transition. Starting with simple pleasantries, such as “hello,” “good morning,” “yes,” “no,” and “thank you,” will get you a long way and emit a sign of respect to the locals that you can about learning their language and culture. Numbers would be a great next learning point so you can understand how much something costs at your local shops and restaurants. Try not to engulf yourself with learning too much too soon. Just like English takes time with our students, learning Chinese takes time as well. Many locals will be patient and try to help you along the way which will just improve your communication ability in the long run. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes! The only way to learn is through the mistakes we make!

Stay Calm and China On

Again, moving abroad for the first time can be a very unsettling feeling. Especially during the first months after your arrival. Taking these steps to ensure you have an inkling of what’s to come will help with those disconcerting feelings. Remember to research as much as you can about the city, take in the sights and sounds all around you, learn and emerge yourself in the culture, but most importantly, have fun! This is an experience of a lifetime and not many people will have this opportunity. If you’re feeling uneasy, go outside and explore your city! Staying in will only be counterproductive in your transitioning to your new “home.” Nevertheless, if you’re ever worried about life in the new city just remember to stay calm and China on!