Early Childhood Teacher - Spanish or Mandarin

Description:

Morningside PlayCare, Inc. is an education social enterprise in the process of building a replicable learning lab. We are building a start-up team and seeking innovative people: A program director, teachers, aspiring teachers, childcare workers, and a recruiter, to join our start-up team. 

We do this by providing nurturing care; and immersing children in multiple languages through play, creative activities, and the exploration of their environment.

Our Philosophy: We believe that care and guided learning should follow the natural developmental stages of children.  Our approach is play-based and progressive.  Through play and engaging interaction with their environment and their teachers, young children will naturally and quickly acquire one, two or three languages at an early age.  We believe it is important for children to spend time in Nature, eat healthy, real, food; play outside, and engage in authentic arts and inquiry activities.

OUR VISION

To help create a generation of Americans able to serve as bridge builders, peacemakers, and citizen diplomats, because they are globally and academically competent, fluent in Chinese culture, multilingual, conscious of the planet’s environment, and civically engaged in creating and sustaining socially just societies.

A Model Early Childhood Language Program:  Our goal is to build, month by month, year by year, a model early childhood Mandarin immersion program using best practices in the field, and contributing to the literature on best practices by documenting and publishing our work. 

A Teacher Training Program:  Aspiring Early Childhood Teachers and Caregivers have an opportunity to acquire experience, while receiving coaching in a small, intimate, and low stress setting.  They work and learn under the title Intern, Assistant Teacher, or Novice Teacher.

An Opportunity for Graduate Research: To help us document children’s progress and contribute to the literature on best practices, we are designing a lab where graduate students’ interested in how children acquire multiple languages in an early childhood program setting, can help us build a data base, while exploring important research questions of mutual interest.

Nursery - 5^th Grade: Morningside PlayCare is a toddler and pre-school program now, but our vision is to grow into a Nursery through elementary school program.

Responsibilities:

Teacher, Early Childhood – Work closely and collaboratively with the Executive Director to launch and grow this new program.  Be responsible for developing emergent curriculum inspired by the children’s interests, engaging the children in indoor and outdoor play-based learning activities.  Partner with parents to help guide children’s growth and development. Create a classroom culture of exploration, respect for nature, and creative play. 

Maintain a safe and nurturing classroom environment. 

Develop and implement weekly lesson plans and prepare quarterly assessment reports and videos.

Coach and supervise assistant teachers and interns

All classroom responsibilities are carried out, while playing and communicating in the target language (Mandarin  or Spanish) with children who are native speakers of other languages.   

Qualifications: