Teaching = Career

I haven't talked about my class very much, but today we got our mock ECERS scores back, and I wouldn't say they were horrible but some of the stuff we definitely didn't agree with and some of the things we have no control over. 

ECERS = Early Childhood Education Ratings Scale

Some examples of things I don't agree with:

We didn't provide enough materials for art, because we wanted them to decorate their cups that we were planting our greenhouses in with stickers. We provided all different kinds of stickers and let them choose which ones and how many they wanted to use. We choose stickers because realistically it was the only thing that would really work with a plastic cup. 

We set up a tent in blocks center (because we were talking about things you do in the grass, ie. camping.) The lady said it took up too much room so that meant our blocks center was too small. Our blocks center is bigger than any other I've ever seen, but okay, I guess our room is on the small side and we just won't use the tent again. 

Some examples of things I don't really don't know what to do about:

The children who are being shown positive interaction yet choose to not interact well with each other. 

The children who refused to wash their hands, or just won't.

Children who decide to eat food they've dropped on the floor. 

The good stuff:

Children are well supervised.

Teachers have positive interaction with children.

As you can imagine some of these are pretty jaw dropping, but my class never ceases to amaze me at what they are capable of, good and not so good. I was thinking about it, my group of 3 and 4 year olds may act more like 2 year olds much of the time, however they are all capable of being the sweetest kids ever, when they want to be. As challenging as it is to be a teacher in a class of this nature, I think it will make me better and stronger in the process.

 We did receive a little over a 5 (out of 7) on our overall average score for just our classroom. We are a 5 star center so we did fall within our 5 stars, just not quite as high as we would have liked.