”All I really need to know.. I learned in kindergarten.” (Robert Fulghum)

My mum was my kindergarten teacher and I remember playing games, singing and dancing with her. Those days have always been my favourite memories. That may be the reason why I’ve become an English teacher in kindergarten today.

I really love the idea of playing games,singing, dancing, interacting and learning with kids. It’s a great pleasure to be a part of their development process and being their very first English teacher. You should be patient,enthusiastic,fun loving and dedicated and should always keep in mind that what students learn and experience in kindergarten can shape their future and affect their success or their failure in later years.

Kindergarten students learn mainly playing games, singing songs, chanting rhymes, listening to stories or doing any kind of fun activities. It’s such a pleasure for me to see how much they can learn and produce with their limited language. You can watch this short animoto:

(You can read my guest post on Barbara Sakamoto’s blog about teaching in kindergarteners in Turkey.)

I have been using technology with my students in my lessons. When you consider kindergarten, it’s more difficult to integrate technology as my kids don’t know writing or reading. Fortunately, there are some tools that I can use in my classes such as Voicethread, Glogster, Voki, Pimpampum,BubbleJoy,Little Bird Tales, Animoto, slideshows, wikis.

I had seen other kindergarten blog examples in different countries and I had always the thought of having one and this year, the home room teacher of my age 6 class and I have started our first collaborative kindergarten blog ! I can proudly announce that this is the very first kindergarten blog in Turkey!

We are using both languages,Turkish and English. Home room teacher is writing in Turkish with her posts and I’m writing in English.We’re taking pictures, filming kids, using Web 2.0 tools, giving useful links and interacting with parents and our students. Parents also are very pleased about our blog. Some of them have already commented on some of the blog posts and thanking us for creating this blog.

Kids are also very happy and enthusiastic about our blog. They have learnt the address of the blog and they visit our blog often at home and talk about what they have seen on it. We’re also showing the blog once a week in our classes and we’re talking about the pictures and the activities they have done this week. It’s so funny to see their faces or watch their expressions when they see their pictures, hear their voices or watch their films.

What I realize is that blogging in kindergarten has also increased their attention, participation and involvement in my lessons because when they learn English, produce the language or participate in the activities, they know that they can be on the blog and others can see what they are doing at school. They are proud of themselves and I’m proud of them!

”The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.” (Tim O’Reilly)

”Unity is strength… when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.” (Mattie Stepanek)

I look for projects that I thrive on where I can learn from people that I collaborate. I do enjoy collaboration and every collaboration has helped me to grow and become a better teacher!

I’ve recently become a member of two great social networks. The first one is BeltFree which stands for Bloggers in ELT, Freelancer. This group has been created by Karenne Sylvester (@kalinagoenglish) on Ning. The aim of this community is to share and exchange ideas, collaborate and inspire!! I am happy and honored to be a part of this group because all the members are great teachers, trainers, bloggers and tweeters. They all have a lot to share and can easily inspire, motivate and enrich you with their ideas even we are all from different parts of the world. This is what I call a real ‘collaboration’.

As Karenne mentioned on her post previously, to be a part of this community, you should meet the following criteria :

-You are (or have been) an English Language Teacher
-Your blog is over 3 months old
-Your last post was less than 3weeks ago
-You have written at least 10+ articles
-You post more than once a month
-Your blog(s) belongs to you and not a corporation!

Hope to meet you on BeltFree …

Te second project is the One Comment a Day which has been created by Andrew Marcinek (@andicinek) on Ning. (Read his blog post about this project.) The aim of this project is to leave a positive comment on other bloggers ‘ blogs at least once a day!!  The universe is full of great ideas and certainly this project is one of them!!

Whenever I get a new comment on one of my posts, I think that I’m writing and some other people are really reading it and even bothering to reply for it!  Every comment is a smile on my  face and putting this smile on other people’s faces and doing it every day is awesome. It’s friendly , motivating, inspiring and encouraging!! Please join this project and leave a comment for some one!!

Thanks to all bloggers+tweeters from whom I ‘m learning new things every single day… Today my PLN is more crowded than my face to face friends list and I’m proud of it !!