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Becoming a teacher is becoming more and more difficult as the economy struggles to rebound. Teachers are still being let go and wages continue to not only be frozen but to be cut with furlough days. Still, many dream of making a difference in the life of a child and indeed good, dedicated teachers are more necessary now than ever.

Here are some tips on how to become a teacher, from preparation to accepting a position in a school:

First, in preparation, a teacher candidate needs three things:

A professional portfolio

Character Reference Letters

A Professional Resume

Once these are prepared, then it is time to apply for open positions. It is vital to keep the job search organized because teacher candidates are likely to need to send in many applications. Here are some helpful tips.

Organizing Your Job Search

Once the prospective teacher has secured an interview, it is time to prepare to wow the administrative staff who will be conducting the interview. Preparation is important at this stage as well.

Interview Help for Teachers

Interview Questions for Teachers

Once you have received your first job offer, accepted a position and signed the necessary paperwork, your job is not finished yet. Until you are tenured, you will be the first to go when budgets are squeezed and cuts must be made. Find how how to keep your position.

How to be the Best Teacher Candidate to Get or Keep a Position

Not enough info? Find out more!!

Getting a Job as a Teacher

How to Teach the Alphabet

Jennifer Wagaman — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:54:12 +0000

Children are taught how to identify the letters of the alphabet in preschool – and they then move onto the sounds of the letters which transitions into learning to read. Sometimes the preschool curriculum does not cover each letter individually or a teacher or parent might want more ideas on how to teach a letter. Here is a collection of articles – one per letter, that gives a variety of ideas on how to teach that individual letter of the alphabet to preschool age children.

Collection of articles on teaching the Alphabet!

How to teach each of the Letters of the Alphabet, including snack and craft ideas:

F
G

J
K
L

N
O
P
Q

Review of all the Letters

Have any more great ideas? Share with us!

The Public School Debate

Jennifer Wagaman — Tue, 18 May 2010 11:38:49 +0000

I was going to title this the homeschool debate, then realized it’s not about homeschooling, its about public schools. The alternative is not just homeschooling, but private schools too. Homeschooling gets a bad rap for pulling kid out of the public school system, but people say they don’t have the money for private schooling and leave it at that. In reality, parents who choose to homeschool are the same as parents who choose the private schools. In the end, it’s the public schools they are avoiding.

There is a lot of debate about how to improve the public school system. In fact, public school teachers are often offended when kids are pulled – only when pulled for homeschooling though, ironically. It is a well known fact in the public school system that a private school student will be ahead of all public school students. Homeschool kids on the other hand? They are rebels who aren’t being educated, or have parents who think they can do a better job than a certified teacher.

Well actually, some parents can do better than a certified teacher – if a teacher at a private school can do better (based on test scores) than a teacher at a public school, why can’t a parent do better? I think it’s not a matter of who does a better job, it’s a matter of parents taking control of their child’s education. Some parents choose to educate at home, some choose to lobby for better public schools and some parents choose to pay for private school.

Why should we criticize any parent for being involved enough in their child’s education to make a tough decision? Homeschooling is not an easy choice, just ask one of the thousands of homeschoolers who give up their time each and every day to ensure their children have a good education. Private school is not an easy choice, just as the thousands of parents who give up their hard earned money to pay 15,000-20,000 or more a year on top of taxes for public schools. Public school is the easy answer, unless you want a good education for your child, then it is a hard choice too – just ask the few parents who put the time and effort into working with teachers and schools and spending the time working with their child to ensure a good education.

The parent who sends a child to the public school system blindly, expecting a well educated child after high school graduation with no effort on their part, is the parent who should be criticized.

In the end, a good education is the goal, and reaching the goal is difficult no matter which path you choose to take. So public school teachers, back off of homeschool families, the effort of a good education for an individual child takes time and effort and money on the part of the parent, regardless of the direction they steer.

Looking for more information on homeschooling? Check out My Homeschool Guide

Teacher Appreciation Week 2010

Jennifer Wagaman — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 20:27:31 +0000

It is coming up on teacher appreciation week again this year. Learning A-Z.com is bringing back their teacher appreciation free week as well! Check it out:

To thank the world’s teachers during Teacher Appreciation Week from May 3-7, we’re opening up all
six of our PreK-6 Learning A-Z websites — for free. Sites include Reading A-Z, Raz-Kids, Writing
 A-Z, Science A-Z, Vocabulary A-Z, and Reading-Tutors. Nearly 50,000 teachers took advantage of
our Open House last year and pre-registration for this year is now open. Just go to
 http://www.learninga-z.com/openhouse — and then pass it on to your friends and colleagues!

Where does the Money Go?

Jennifer Wagaman — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:36:31 +0000

Where does the Money go in Schools?

To the education of the kids, right? Text books, teacher supplies, teacher salaries. Paper for students to write on, pencils and crayons, tissues for runny noses and bandaids. Stickers and educational videos. Books. Educational games.Research based programs that help kids learn to read, write and do math.

Right?

Wrong.

Just ask a teacher. Ask a teacher who ran out of pencils at Christmas – ran out of her own stash bought at the beginning of school. Ask a teacher who got a tax refund for $200 of supplies that didn’t cover everything they bought. Ask a teacher who no longer has a job because of layoff or who is anticipating a layoff at the end of the year.

It’s a good question, isn’t it? Where does the money go?

Teacher Layoffs Loom

How to Read with Children: Secrets From a Tutor

Jennifer Wagaman — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:50:50 +0000

Reading with children is a simple task, right? Sit down together, open book, read words. Here are a few secrets that can help anyone sit down with a child turn a reading time into a rich learning time.

Talk about the pictures. Ask the child questions about what is going on in the pictures. Young children (preschool age) can be asked to point to various objects in the picture to increase vocabulary. Ask questions about non-verbal communication happening in pictures.
Ask Questions. Ask simple to complex comprehension questions about the story based on the ability level of the child. Questions can include who, what, where, when why and how. Try to ask one question per page.
Emphasize Inflection. When reading to young children, parents are often overheard making silly voices and being overly dramatic to keep the child’s attention. When the child gets older, parents should not lose this inflection. While the silly voices may disappear , the emotion in the book needs to remain in order to teach children how to read with inflection.

While these tips will help enrich reading time, the simple act of reading to your children is important and can make a huge difference in your child’s education.

What Teachers Make

Jennifer Wagaman — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:46:53 +0000

Top Resources to Learn English Grammar You Can’t Miss

Jennifer Wagaman — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 15:17:20 +0000

Guest Post from David García:

What if we were to tell you that there’s an easy and even funny way for learning and improving your knowledge of English Grammar? Would you believe us? Probably not, but if you keep reading and try the resources that we mention in this post you might discover that you’re actually wrong.

The free websites that we present you here are very user friendly and contain top quality material to improve your English grammar:

The BBC offers Grammar Challenge, a collection of programs about different grammar topics. Each programme includes a grammar explanation (you can download it in .pdf format), an audio file (in .mp3 format) and complementary material.

There are also exercises to practice each grammar topic. There usually are three really entertaining interactive quizzes and a written exercise per topic.

Link | BBC Grammar Challenge

The British Council (Learn English Central) also offers explanations to the common areas of grammar along with fantastic grammar games to challenge your knowledge.

Both: explanations and games are stored in two archives sorted alphabetically where you’ll find any topic that you need.

Link | Learn English Central

Grammar Girl is the resource that the advanced English grammar learners are looking for: deep, clear and attention to the detailed explanations to learn all the secrets of the English grammar.

You can listen to the explanation (also download the mp3 audio file) and see the whole transcription on the website.

Link | Grammar Girl

Last but not least we’d like to include Free Rice on this list. In there you’ll be able to test your grammar knowledge and for each answer you get right, they’ll donate 10 grains of rice through the World Food Programme to help end hunger.

Pretty cool, eh? What are you waiting for?!

Link | Free Rice

This is a guest post from blogger and education lover David García. David collaborates in different education blogs like Learn English Online and englishdragon.cn (网上学英语).

How to Teach a Child Basic Math: Secrets From A Tutor

Jennifer Wagaman — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:47:03 +0000

Basic math is often overlooked by how simple it seems. The problem occurs when a child doesn’t “get it”. In fact, many children do not understand what they are doing and are only memorizing. Memorizing is not a bad thing, in fact, memorizing multiplication facts is something that every teacher emphasizes at some point, but a child needs to understand the math before memorization happens.

Teaching basic math in a way that a child can comprehend it is not so difficult, it just takes time and creativity. (These are two things you will begin to see a pattern in over the coming days and weeks.)

One-To-One Correspondence

A teacher term for learning to count and add is one-to-one correspondence. This is the ability of the child to connect one number with one object. So line up five ducks and count – one – two – three – four – five. Each duck represents one, yet as you move down the row the number or count goes up. Teaching this concept is the foundation for all math.

Once children know how to count with one-to-one correspondence, they can move on to addition and subtraction. If I have 3 ducks and add two more, now I have five ducks. Show this with something that the child can touch and manipulate in order for the concept to stick.

Teach Math with Manipulatives

When teaching any basic math concept, it needs to be paired with a manipulative. This means any object a child can touch and move with his or her hands. The physical moving of objects while learning math will make abstract concepts concrete and enable a child to learn faster and with greater comprehension.

Finally, if a concept is not making sense to a child, do not continue to repeat he same lesson or teaching tactic. If a child does not get the point, try from a different angle. It would be like using the same vocabulary word in the definition. In order to teach the child the concept, use different words and different ideas until something clicks and makes sense. You will see the light bulb come on when you figure out how to teach it so it makes sense.