Miri Catholic Diocese Bishop Richard Ng (seated, centre) with participants and speakers. He is flanked by Tiong (left) and Catholic Kindergarten Board of Management advisor Sister Odilia Ngui.
MIRI: The Miri Catholic Diocese recently held a two-day Kindergarten Teacher-development Workshop on class management and effective lesson delivery.
It was based on William Butler Yeats’ statement that “education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting a fire”.
Two Methodist College Kuala Lumpur lecturers in Early Childhood Education taught 20 participant how to make the teaching of Mathematics, Science and English meaningful through fun-filled experiential activities based on the National Preschool Standard Curriculum (NPSC).
Trainer Rosalind Lee noted the importance of engaging pupils rather than just teaching them.
“Teaching Mathematics is a challenge; most teachers themselves do not love Mathematics. This workshop hopes to engage teachers in the same way they, the teachers, can engage the pupils in learning Mathematics concepts,” she explained.
Teachers were shown how children learn through naturalistic, informal, and adult-guided or structured learning experiences.
Concepts shared included one-to-one correspondence and the principle of subitising, which helps children to instantly recognise a number pattern without counting.
The language component of the workshop focussed on listening and speaking skills – appreciative listening, creative listening, discriminate listening, critical listening and purposeful listening.
Activities ranged from playing music during snack time for children to enjoy (appreciative listening) to the three-step method to increase young children’s ability to follow directions and instructions (purposeful listening).
“It really hits me how important listening is – it comes first,” said one participant.
Another activity had participants listening to and identifying pre-recorded sounds such as birds chirping, dogs barking and children giggling, so they could describe the sounds as accurately as possible to help expand children’s vocabulary.
Participants were also encouraged to develop proper sentences as well as synonyms for words.
Co-trainer Anita Wong taught participants to sign the alphabet and a few songs.
“The incorporation of sign language into songs is in line with one of the learning standards stated in the NPSC, which is ‘Listen to and enjoy nursery rhymes, action songs, poems and stories.’ Instead of teaching children random actions to accompany the singing of children’s songs, teachers are recommended to use proper signs from a recognised sign language such as BIM (Malaysian Sign Language) as this will render the actions more meaningful and purposeful. This would also definitely appeal to pupils who are more physically inclined,” she said.
Participants were also given suggestions of activities to conduct with their students such as Board Games, Simon Says and Bingo to inject some fun into children’s learning so that they will grow to love school.
“Apart from the physical revamping of our kindergartens and upgrading of facilities and equipment, the training and retraining of our teachers and head-teachers are a top priority on our agenda towards a holistic education,” said Catholic Kindergarten Board of Management chair Robinette Tiong yesterday.