Kindergarten co-ordinator, Heli Kytola

Heli is a teacher with many years of experience with children with special needs and has often had to adjust her teaching methods to suit the students’ needs. Through Riverkids she is now doing training with the teachers on how to approach their students and to work for a better learning environment.

I started working here in Phnom Penh in the beginning of October and four exiting weeks have already passed. Everyone is very welcoming and friendly so it is easy to like it here.

I have been monitoring the Kindergarten classes and I having some work shops with the teachers. We have been discussing some general ideas about early childhood learning, different developmental stages and ages and how to observe the children in the classroom. We have refurnished the classroom and made an inventory list of the material that should be available for us as well as the children in the classroom at all times. We have also tried to figure out how to get the parents more involved in their children’s schooling.

We have a book about different developmental stages in English which seems fairly easy to read as well as some web pages but we need to get the pages translated before we can start studying properly. I don't have many books here so I need to research the Internet or put together a list of books that are the “musts” for me to buy.

If you have any recommendations for further reading, please forward it to me. I would love to find some informative and “easy” to read books or web pages about recent research on children’s play and the importance of playing so if you know where to find them please let me know, I would appreciate that a lot.

Our children in the Kindergarten are from 4 to 7 years of age. They are really lovely young people. The age mix and shortage of staff makes the lessons quite challenging to plan. The teachers are responsible for 15-20 students each as it is now.

Most of our children just love the Kindergarten. There are more toys to play with in the Kindergarten now than before since we got some Lego donated. Lego is really great and the kids love to build things with them but they do love the jigsaw puzzles and the Khmer alphabet puzzles as well. They do some counting and writing of letters in Khmer every day and they have some time in the morning to learn the weekdays and the date of the day etc. We need to buy or make numbers and number cards in Khmer since the numbers are completely different from Arabic numerals.

It also would be great to have some very simple wooden building bricks (Kapla) in the classroom. You know the ones children use when they build houses, stables and garages or just want to keep some toys separate by building fences between them.

Unfortunately we can’t have any regular outdoor activities because there is no playground and no space for football or any other sports activities near the Kindergarten so the teachers sing activity songs and rhymes in the classroom for the children to do some exercise. If we wanted to have a sports activity day one day we would probably need to take a minivan to the Olympic Stadium to do so. That we haven’t done yet with the small children, but who knows, maybe one day…

Heli Kytola