It has been four years since I began my journey with the Oberoi International school. I started teaching in the nursery as an Intern, where I was clueless about what the program had to offer. But I wanted to learn and prove that I could be good at this. I had a lot of opportunities to learn from my colleagues. There were days when I used to observe and take down notes of the student’s behavior and how they were learning and improving. There were days when I could take up some parts of a session during the class hours. There were also days when I was only given a task to take care of a child or take pictures for the learning stories. This gave me the internal motivation to grow as a teacher.
After a year, I was promoted from being just an intern to being an assistant teacher, where I was given an equal opportunity to manage a class like my co-teacher. That gave me confidence in communicating and interacting with children. Usually, my role was to help with a smooth transition from one class to another, especially when visiting the library. I would help children when they had to issue a book they liked. I enjoyed reading to them after the library class ended, and we had extra time to do a little additional reading. The children enjoyed it too. During the day, my responsibility as an early years teacher was to ensure a smooth transition from class time to snack time or specialists like music, physical education, and library. During the first two years, I had a shot at learning immensely from my colleagues, which was fun and memorable.
After three years of working closely with the Nursery, I wanted to try something new. So, I decided to work in the library. I became a library literacy teacher. This was entirely new for me, so I started attending webinars and classes of a library teacher -Ms. Sushma. This year has been enjoyable, and with enjoyment comes learning. I began teaching Senior KG and Grade 1, which was utterly new to me, and I was nervous about what it would be like. It was challenging initially, but after class, I made sure I had new ways and new exciting stories for my students. I learned the different platforms where books are made available for children to read. I was allowed to handle and control the class independently.
As a library teacher, I also learned and explored different digital platforms like Destiny discover Epic, and Tumble books. I also practised modulation and expressing myself to engage my students. This year as everything was online, we decided to have a hive blog to help the parents understand how the library works. This year has changed my perspective on teaching and learning.
By Anjini Mehra
Oberoi International School – JVLR Campus
