EXPERTS

Professionally the most successful experiences to me are those teaching and learning situations where the whole group is working enthusiastically and the spirit is good. I can also feel the flow with small pupils and that flow strengthens also the teacher in an amazing way!

I work as a Finnish school teacher and I have ten eager pupils at the age of 3 to 5 years. There are speed and happening with them! To get everybody to concentrate to the same thing at the same time, there has to be speed and changing situations on the lessons. You can´t stay at one thing too long time, or otherwise you notice that the kids are drawing their workbooks full, scramble on the floor or hanging on teacher´s neck… What can be done during the lessons? A small teaching moment and straight after that some play to prevent getting bored. And between that moments, songs, jokes, fairy tales, theater, foolishness. And to every suitable situations “heavy” staff, connected to the kids own life. Only the sky is the limit what can be done at school or kindergarten! And what is the best, you get instant feedback how successful the lessons are! If they are having fun, the eyes sparkle and they can´t sit on their places. If it is boring, they tell that honestly straight to you also. This honesty and genuinity is the best working with kids that age!

This autumn we made a trip with group of children to the farm which is nearby to our kindergarten. There is a café on that farm, they set up riding courses there and all kinds of different events. We prepaired the trip in advance with the kids, discussed what animals we will see there and drew pictures of the animals and sang songs which suited to the theme. On that trip day the kids were thrilled and walked breedzily in double line to the farm. Luckily the weather was sunny. On the farm we saw  chickens, horses, dogs and lambs, and the kids were facinated especially to the little ponies. We were allowed also to touch those. We ate our picnic lunch at the yard and walked back to the kindergarten. After that the kids rested a while. Kids talked about the trip for a long time afterwards. Everybody draw something which they remembered best from the trip. These kinds of trips refresh children´s and kindergarten workers daily routines. 

In our school are more than before parents, who are very helpless and completely off their children´s everyday life. A child comes to school dressed up in a white mohair dress and she must to be so careful with the dress that she can´t play or do almost anything. Parents expect to get information in advance from every crafts sessions, so that they can dress their children with dresses which can be washed. I don´t know if it is just a coincident that there are so many such cases, or is child´s (messy) reality too far from that…

Hello to all the European colleagues. I am leaving here my story even though more than a story, what i am leaving are my doubts and hesitation. HAVE YOU EVER HAD A GIFTED CHILD IN YOUR CLASS?. I have been reading a lot and i know they use to have a a very fluid language for their age, learn to read very quickly, have lots of insights for their age, are sensitive, loving and they have something difficult to explain. 2 years ago I had one child in 4 years which I believe was gifted, but his parents changed him in primary school and I have lost track.
My chief of studies told me that it was a very sensitive issue and that with such small children, it was better to let it go, she more or less told me that I should leave others to deal with “that problem”: let primary school teachers take care of it. I was worried about the fact that the sooner it is detected, the better for the child. I also know that it has to be diagnosed by qualified staff, it is very important to count on a clinic diagnose of specialised proffesionals.
My reflection is the following: we are hearing a lot about funding cuts, which it is true we have them, but it is not all about money. I believe that many times we teachers do not get involved as much as we should. I am not sure if Juan was gifted or less, but the attitude of “letting it go” is very common, it si not about money but of getting involved a bit more. I am not sure if when I was a child our teachers got more involved than nowadays, i do not remember (could it be child amnesia?) but i have the feeling that they did.
I WOULD REALLY LIKE TO GET BACK FROM SOMEONE WHO HAS HAD A GIFTED CHILD IN CLASS COULD SHARE HIS/HER EXPERIENCE, when and how it was diagnosed, how did they work in class, how t affected the other children... Thanks in advance.

 School bullying is a very common phenomenon these days and media talks lot of it. Will it ever end? Who knows. Hopefully, in our time of increasing knowledge and awareness, the problem is taking seriously, not just as project –thinking. Bullying leads to considerable suffering with those who become targets of it.

I became bullied at school, mostly during the elementary school years, but also during the secondary school years. Bullying meant discrimination, laughing (at my appearance), sometimes pushing or kicking. I can´t say why I was different. Was it the length or bigger size compared to others? Or was it shyness, the rich world of imagination or the other feature of me which irritated others? I don´t know. But nowadays, it doesn´t hardly matter at all. I´m still different compared to others, that´s a fact. Gradually, I have learned to see that being different is a value and all people those close to me are different as well. I´m not an exception - I´m good the way I am. But how hard it has been to believe that!

In the beginning when working with children my past was a problem. Practically that meant I couldn´t work among children even though I wanted. That was before I sorted things out in a therapy and before I was able to unleash my childhood traumas behind. The most difficult things for me at work have been 1) being an authority, 2) building up my self-confidence, 3) handling children´s laugh (because I felt children were laughing at me), 4) understanding children´s needs, 5) receiving critic and confessing my own mistakes at work. Surrounded by these problems it´s practically impossible to guide a group of children or to be an adult member of education community. Everyone who works the similar job can understand that. I can say that I´m proud of myself, and those problems has mostly gone and I can work among children. And I can claim that nowadays my experiences are my strengths which I wouldn´t change away. The soggy ground turned into personal/intellectual capacity, from where to get strength.

 I still remember vividly when I first started as a young nanny in the kindergarten. How I enjoyed being and playing with children, and how quickly the children got used to me and came confidently close to me and to my lap. Childrens`s emotional reactions were so clearly seen that it was a little bit confusing to a young nanny. I didn´t have any younger siblings and I wasn´t very used to take care of children. However, I felt I was intented to that profession. In particular, I remember one unpleasant situation when we were dining with the little ones. One child didn´t want to eat the food, he said it was bad. One older nanny had the opinion that the child has to eat everything from the plate and it is forbidden to say the food is bad. Poor child sat at the table for a long time and was unable to eat the food. In fact the older nanny forced the child to eat and the result was that the child throwed up. I was so unexperienced that time that I was unable to intervene that situation. Fortunately today the attitude towards children´s eating has changed.

 Recently I have been thinking a lot how important it is that the co-operation with parents goes well. Extreme-parents are emphasized/highlighted in my current job, even though there are not so many of them. With extreme-parents I mean parents who don´t care how their children´s day has gone, or on the other hand those parents who ask very carefully all the smallest details and who don´t trust our professionalism. Most of the parents are ordinary, nice, easy to co-operate with, interested in their children´s welfare. Another important theme in my work is nowadays multiculturalism. How to deal with a child and parents who are coming from another culture. I mean the communication difficulties, how to be sure that the parents have understood what I´m talking to them. 

I guess this could have happened to anyone but, one year, explaining the unity in Christmas, I asked who were the Three Kings and a girl told me that they were Juan Carlos, Queen Sofia and Leticia. Because they are kings. I told them I was referring to those from the East, the Three Wise Men of Christmas, and she told me that his father said they live in the Kings Palace of Orient and the King goes out only at Christmas. I was speechless.

Children are very indiscreet. This is a story a mother told me. She says that her daughter is starting to be a "bigmouth." The other day they were in the elevator with a neighbor they don’t like or something like that. They were waiting to go up the three of them and the girl said "Mom, are we going up with this dumb?"

We had a class pet, a little hamster called Pon. When I arrived to school he was already there so they explained me that when he died, they bought another just like him because the children became very sad every time he died. It seemed to be a good idea but, hey, stranger things have happened.
One day Joaquín, a 5 years old child, came to school very sad and her mother warned me that his dog had died. From time to time he cried and told me that if Lala (his dog) had eaten the same as Pon the hamster she wouldn’t have died.
So I am not in favor of "reviving" the hamster, that means to deceive children and that's not good.
Here I leave my opinion.

One day I was walking down the street with my daughter and we passed a man of color. My daughter started screaming, "look, mom, a black man!!!" I was embarrassed and the more I tried to make her be quiet, the more she screamed. This made me think that we talked about multicultural education but there are children who are really far from the topic. So I prepared an activity I found on the internet about values education at AMEI, particularly on Tolerance and told my kids in class about the different races with pictures from internet. I hope no mother will feel as embarrased as I did.