Teacher Mira

I am a Malaysian from Kuala Lumpur. Educated in a Boarding school right up to high school. I grew up speaking English at home and in my neighborhood. However, I had to learn Bahasa Malaysia, our National Language. I understand how difficult it is for someone to learn a new language. I am married with two adult children. I am a retired school teacher. I want to use my talents and knowledge to help children to learn the English Language. Currently I am tutoring my former school students My first job was in an American Semi-conductor company as a Human Resource personnel. Here, I held various responsibilities such as handling issues pertaining to employees' concern which were brought up to Management's attention. Sadly, the company wound-up in 1998 and returned to the US. We received a 'golden handshake' Not resting on my laurels, I embarked on my teaching career. Having attained both a Montessori Certificate and TESOL I have never looked back but enjoyed teaching young kids. After completing my Montessori course, I immediately started teaching at the Children's House. This is a pre-school following all the teaching methods of the Montessori curriculum. We started with living skills, phonics right up to reading and writing. The children were from all walks of life mostly from well-to-do background as such schools are very expensive here. After completing my TESOL Certificate, I worked as an elementary school teacher in a private school. Here, the children were from the ages of 7 to 12 years. We had our lessons structured following the syllabus. We use CEFR guidelines in all our subjects. I had to teach grammar, vocabulary, Literature and Bible Knowledge as this was a mission school. The students were from various walks of life, The lessons are taught in English, followed by Bahasa Malaysia as the second language and Mandarin. Besides teaching, I had weekly out-door activities such as badminton, table-tennis and netball which was on a weekly rotation. Before the daily lessons, I will brief about the topic, eg Prepositions. I will show a 4 to 5 minute video for then to understand. These children would have learnt them before but might have forgotten. Then, I pick a few students randomly to answer some of the lessons in their activity book. When the lessons are done, time permitting I will upload a quiz on the topic for them to participate, In this way, the students will be interactive. For literature, example, Oliver Twist. Firstly a short video will be shown to make the students understand the situation way back when there were no cars and only horse carts. How the orphans were treated. After that, each student will take a turn to read a paragraph. In this way, students will be corrected in their pronunciation and intonation. For Bible, I will get one story. Example,' Moses.' Students will view the animated movie and after that I will ask questions based on the story. Sometimes, I will give them Bible word search or quiz.