You finally did it. You’ve jumped through all the hoops, taken the classes, gotten the certificates, and started your dream job: you’re a preschool teacher! You bumped into your old high school friend, Sally, and she asked what you do. How can you fill her in on all the benefits of having a daycare job and being a preschool teacher?
What 5 Skills Do Successful Preschool Teachers Have?
You got a daycare job because you love children. You became a preschool teacher because you wanted to take that extra step into childhood education.
What skills do you need to have to succeed?
- Communication skills
- Creativity
- Interpersonal skills
- Organization
- Stamina
- Communicate Effectively
As a preschool teacher, you must communicate with children in your class as well as their parents and caregivers. Additionally, you will need to be able to speak with other colleagues and the administration in your school.
- Endless Creativity
Children can get bored quickly. As a preschool teacher, your lesson plans must be varied and exciting. Your pupils may also have different learning styles, so the ability to customize lesson plans on the fly will be necessary.
- Honed Interpersonal Skills
Working with preschoolers means dealing with potential issues around play, emotional needs, and working with other children. It would help if you were prepared to navigate any issues that may come up in your classroom. You will also need to form relationships with coworkers, the administration, and the parents and caregivers of your students.
- Highly Organized
When in a daycare job and working with children, things can get disorganized quickly. Therefore, you will need to make sure you keep detailed records and lesson plans, which are necessary for each child’s documented record for the future.
- Physical Stamina
Any daycare job requires a lot of energy, but when you are a preschool teacher, you need more than most! You will be standing, walking, bending down, and perhaps even running – dealing with children is a physically demanding daycare job.
What are the Rewards of Being a Preschool Teacher?
When choosing a job, we all want to pick a job with benefits. Not many come with the ability to help develop a firm foundation for someone’s life! Being a preschool teacher brings rewards like no other job.
- Observe first moments
- Help develop learning styles
- Celebrate breakthroughs
- Next level multitasking
- Creativity abounds
- Willing pupils
- Instant job results
- Open parents’ eyes
- Revisit your inner child
- Experiencing students’ “first times” – The excitement that comes with learning new words, new skills, and new ideas is always like a lightbulb moment, and as a preschool teacher, you will be able to observe these many times with multiple students.
- Modify learning methods – There is no one-shoe-fits-all in education. Every child is unique in how they learn, and it is up to you, their preschool teacher, to figure out the best way to teach them. It is stimulating to see how they learn and how you can best teach them. It keeps the job fresh.
- Dynamic breakthroughs – Learning to overcome challenges is hard for all of us, and you’ll teach your young pupils how to do that daily. Some of their learning curves will be longer than others, and you will cheer them on. When they have their breakthroughs, you will be the one there to shout, “Hooray!” with them!
- Multitasking expert – If you thought you were accomplished at multitasking before, your skill set will skyrocket when working with preschoolers. You will need to be aware of everything when dealing with young children – the curriculum, their needs, their behavior, and any staff you supervise. But you can handle it all because you are a preschool teacher!
- Amplify your creativity – However creative you were before you took this daycare job, once you become a preschool teacher, your creative juices will overflow! Working with children, you need to keep things fresh and exciting constantly. You will quickly discover that you have more creative flair than you ever imagined!
- Students looking to learn – Preschool teachers have one thing that few teachers can lay claim to – a roomful of students clamoring to learn. You will never find more willing participants than in a class filled with preschoolers. Every day, they are looking to learn more and more about the world around them.
- Instantaneous results from your work – Not many positions give you positive feedback right away, but when you have a daycare job teaching children, you will get to see the results of your work, sometimes in minutes! There will be many times that your pupils will learn things; you will be gratified repeatedly.
- Be a bridge between parents and their children – With any daycare job, you will spend many hours with people’s children and see them in a different light than their parents. As a preschool teacher, you will have a firsthand view of how the children learn in a classroom setting, which is something their parents don’t often get to see. You can partner with the parents by sharing their children’s weaknesses and strengths, allowing the child to have more allies on their side and, therefore, a stronger foundation for life.
Remember when you were young – There is something extraordinary about seeing things through children’s eyes, and when you work in a daycare job as a preschool teacher, you get to specialize in that. Remind yourself of the magic of science, the mystery of learning to read, and the amazement of animals – you get to experience it all again as a preschool teacher. As you design your curriculum, you will be submerged in what it is like to be a child again.
When you choose a daycare job, you opt to work with children because you enjoy the workplace and atmosphere. Going further and advancing into the role of a preschool teacher means you’ll be making a mark in the lives of children. There are few more noble professions. Join us at The Breakie Bunch Learning Center if this is the calling for you!