Pre-school teachers upgrade skills

Any parent knows that it’s not always easy holding the attention of even the best behaved four year old. But what if you had to cope with over a dozen? The Ministry of Education’s pre-school Unit is wrapping up a session which trains prospective teachers on how to develop the right atmosphere inside the classroom to make children learn. Margaret Williams, Resource Co-ordinator for the Pre-school Unit, says that the early classroom environment is important to the development of students later on.

Margaret Williams, Resource Co-ordinator, Pre-school Unit

“For the past three weeks we’ve been doing training sessions for those people who have applied to open pre-school centres in September 2001. During the three weeks we’ve been making materials, we’ve been doing the theory, we’ve been doing everything that pertains to setting up a centre. This is our culminating activity when we set up a centre the way it should look.”

Sucely Hill, Teacher

“I’m a teacher, I’ve been teaching for eight years but now I’m opening my own pre-school. We see the importance of building a solid foundation for our Belizean children. I think if we start from this point we will at least help to solve some of the problems that our teenagers are facing because we are trying to build the correct pattern of how they should behave.

In our display we have the sand and water, it’s a good experience for the children to learn about science and also to explore, to learn to do things by themselves.”

Betty Westby, Teacher

“This is the house keeping area and a dramatic play area and why we arrange this area like this is because the children need

to feel at home. You know it’s like a home setting and they come in here and they learn to grow, to change, they learn all kind of things, they learn to put on make up, they learn to tie the shoe, and this helps to develop their fine muscle skills.”

Margaret Williams

“Pre-school is the foundation on which other teachers will begin to build. So we lay the foundation in pre school. We would like all pre-school centres look like this because this gives the children an opportunity to do things on their own to discover on their own, do it the play way.”

Williams says that in September the sixteen graduates of the course will open a total of seven pre-schools around the country.