Just think, children spend up to 12,000 hours+ in their first five years in group childcare with a possible another 1,500 hours in before-school care, after-school care and vacation care.  By not being at home, it is up to you as teachers to teach the missed opportunities and for the children to master those skills.

Now that you have the children for such a length of time, then you have those special talents to work and deal with a variety of children behaviors!  What special skills do you have that have made you successful?  Here are some strengths shared by teachers:

• being able to connect with the children and getting on their level.
• managing a classroom and building and maintaining a warm, successful learning classroom environment  
• listening and respecting children and developing creative plans and activities
• doing hands-on activities with the children
• having strong presentation skills
• loving teaching and learning how to adapt
• being organized and finding fun ways
• ability to relate to the child
• being flexible and compassionate in teaching the child
• being patient
• showing perseverance
• doing well-planned lessons
• communicating with other teachers, parents, and children
• adapting a lesson at any time
• knowing the objectives in a lesson plan
• using the natural skills
• knowing how to assess the child
• being a positive role model for the children
• bringing fun and excitement into the classroom
• to never stop smiling
• to bring the "real world" into the classroom
• working one-on-one
• to use voice quality and discipline correctly
• to have confidence
• to manage the classroom

Words, Geometric Shapes, and Emotions Activities

Activity #1 – Be an Occupation.   Children like to mimic and asking a child to mimic individually an occupation like be a piano player, teacher, animal trainer, ballet dancer or any other occupation created by you.  It is fun to watch children create and use their imagination to fulfill the occupation.

Activity #2 – Be a Geometric Shape.   Children individually are asked to use their bodies and make a circle, or square, or triangle, or make designs like a flower by starting first to create a stem, adding leaves, and then the flowers.   This one really takes thinking and imagination to perform.

Activity #3 – Be an Emotion.   Children individually show emotions like mad, happy, puzzled, worry, etc.   Find pictures and cut them out from magazines, cartoon clips from newspapers, or from clip art on the internet.  Place them in a basket, mix them up, let the child pick out a picture and then show perform that emotion to the class and let the class guess it.  You can also divide the class into 2 teams and a point is earned for each correct answer.

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