A School Day in My Life Teaching Pre-K

A month or so before moving to Thailand, I got the email that I was assigned to teach pre-kindergarten. I was ecstatic – I’d been hoping I’d get placed working with younger students, and pre-k sounded like a blast. Being tasked with teaching such a young age almost made me think, “how hard could this be?” I joked to my friends and family that maybe most of my job would just be dancing and clapping to songs with the kids. And while a lot of it is dancing and clapping, it's obviously much more than that.

Overview of Early Childhood Education Levels

In Thailand, the early learning levels look like:

• 2 years of preschool (PK1 and PK2, some schools also offer PK3)
• 3 years of kindergarten (K1, K2, K3)
• Primary school (P1-P6)

In Thailand, kids enter preschool as young as 1 year and 6 months. Compared to the U.S., they're much younger when they experience a classroom for the first time. This also comes with some key differences, like the students aren’t required to be potty trained and most aren't. Being showered and changed at school are also common practices here for preschoolers.

About My Class

Every school and classroom is different, but in my case:

• I’m in the classroom with 2 Thai teachers and 1 Thai teaching assistant
• We teach 17 students in PK2
• The students are about 2-3 years old

I’ve learned that predictable routines are essential for early childhood. Here’s a rough schedule of our typical day:

The Schedule

7:00 AM

Only once a week, teachers in Thailand participate in gate duty. We do this to greet parents and students at drop-off, and walk the little ones to their classrooms. On gate duty days, we are also out in the afternoon from 3:30-5:00 to see all the students off on their way home.

7:30 AM

Otherwise, all teachers arrive at school by 7:30. My kids don't start to trickle in until 8:30, so in the meantime we're cleaning, preparing materials for the day, and enjoying the calm before the storm with our coffees and breakfasts.

9:00 AM

We play with toys in the classroom until 9, and then we might:

• Go to PE
• Go to the playground
• Have circle time, where we dance and clap!

10:00 AM

English lessons! I usually pull two students at a time, and we sit at a table together. We practice greetings and say our names and ages every time. Usually I will introduce a few vocabulary words for our topic of the week, often with physical objects so they can connect the words to the real things. The goal is for them to repeat after me and eventually be able to identify the object on their own. Meanwhile, the other kids might be in a Chinese or art lesson set up the same way, or otherwise playing.

11:00 AM

The kids are whisked away to get showered and changed into their pajamas (too cute). 

Once changed, the kids put on their bibs and eat lunch from the school. One or two of us teachers will be in the adjacent room setting up their sleeping mats while they eat, so everything is ready for nap time.

~12:00-2:30 PM:

A lovely and much needed two-ish hour nap is in store. My Thai co-teachers lead a meditation for a couple minutes to get them settled down and sleepy. When it's time to nap, my teachers and I are making sure everyone is comfortable and not disturbing others, and then they drift off into a deep sleep. They don’t even know how good they have it!

Once they’ve fallen asleep it’s our turn to eat lunch, prepare crafts for the next day, send some pictures from the day to parents, or just take a moment and relax (maybe also fighting the urge not to snooze).

2:30 PM:

We wake the kids up so they can get changed into regular clothes and get ready to eat a snack. I use this time to fold up and put away their sleeping mats for tomorrow.

3:00 PM: 

Snack time! I try to incorporate English throughout the day when I can, but this is a good opportunity for me to have them practice their manners. They can say “More, please!” and “Thank you.”

3:30 PM:

More playtime while the parents arrive for pick-up.

4:00 PM

On the four days that I don't have gate duty, a few foreign teachers and I help out at an after-school English Conversation program for a handful of K1 students.

4:30 PM

End of the school day! All of our kids should be picked up by this point, then we clean up the classroom area before making our way home.

Reality Check: The Facade of It Being Easy

Before the semester started, some of the foreign teachers were quick to express their envy that teaching pre-k will be much easier than the grades they are teaching. Teaching any year of students comes with its own unique benefits and drawbacks. 

Yes, it’s nice in some ways in that I don’t really have to make lesson plans or teach for longer than an hour (and I can’t lie, the 2 hour nap in the middle of the day is huge), but it’s a ton of work. 

We are “on” all the time, and we are part time caretakers, not just teachers. In Thailand, teachers are viewed as a second set of parents, and that role is taken very seriously, especially for students at this young of an age. Managing a class of that many 2 and 3 year olds is a handful! Their terrible twos phases are very much in full swing and I'm constantly dealing with fighting, yelling, and crying. 

Still, working with them is extremely rewarding. Every funny moment and little victory makes all the chaos and stress worth it.