Hi there, I’m curious about how many people got assigned daycares while on JET? My BOE had us all go to daycare at least once a week. Did anyone else have an experience like this?
Edit to ask: how many of you transferred to working in daycares in japan after Jet? Whats your experience?
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I wasn’t ever sent to the local daycares during my tenure on JET, but now that I’m a preschool teacher I would love to have the opportunity to spend time at a Japanese daycare/preschool. Toddlers can be so much fun 😁
Fun fact: Modern research indicates that babies begin to recognize human speech between 0 and 6 months, and within that time begin to develop the ear for whichever language is spoken the most around them.
I have a hypothesis that a Japanese baby who is exposed to English often will develop the ability to hear the differences in our pronunciation that most older Japanese have difficulty with (/r/ and /l/, /t/ and /ch/, /th/ and /s/, /v/ and /b/, /f/ and /h/, etc.)
Not sure if it would work, but it would be interesting to test it out!
I go to nursery school. I used to go a couple times a month, but recently it’s only during breaks. I basically just go and play with the kids and use basic English while we play. If the teacher wants to do a more structured lesson, then they’ll design and lead the activity. Imo I think that style’s better. With how young they are and how basic the stuff we’re doing is, I think it makes more sense to have the early childhood education expert in charge rather than the English language expert.
What I really like about kindergarten is that more than learning about English, the kids learn to become accepting of diversity. I’ve had kids come up to me as ask “I heard [racist remark]. Is it true?” I’m glad that they trusted me enough to come and ask rather than just blindly believing it. I think playing and having positive experiences with ALT from a young age can give kids a positive view of diversity and people different from them. It’s enough to make them pause when they here something racist or xenophobic and think “wait but ○○-sensei is a foreigner and they’re nice. Maybe this thing I’m hearing isn’t true.”
A *lot* of people I know have ended up teaching at international kindergarten after JET. Salaries at Japanese kindergartens are horrifically low (it’s a legitimate social problem and a major cause of the day care shortage) but international kindergartens are popular right now so there are a lot of positions
I’m a CIR and half of my job is working at the local daycare/kindergarten. I spend each morning there acting as an assistant teacher and teaching a 5-15 min English lesson each day for the 3-6 yr old classes.
FYI: The instructor visa legally only covers grade 1-12. To work at preschools or kindergartens you need to get permission for activities outside your visa, which is easy to do the paperwork for. Most BoEs don’t know this and send the ALTs out willy-nilly.