Walking into preschool, you see bright colors, games, and toys. You hear kids screaming or maybe a video/song playing. Stepping into a high school classroom, you see students working independently on chromebooks, or a teacher lecturing. You hear typing, sometimes silence, or students discussing in a group. While these are both very different environments, Mrs.Maldonado manages to work in both. 

The preschool, child development and education academy teacher, Mrs. Maldonado, has always loved working with both little kids and older students. At East Leyden High School, she’s able to make her dream come true. She teaches older kids from ages 14-18 at the beginning and end of the day. In the middle of the day, she coaches high schoolers on how to teach the preschoolers in her program while also doing a lot of the behind the scenes tasks. Throughout her day she balances multiple roles. 

“I like working with older kids. I feel like because, well, I think it’s because I’m sarcastic and I’m quirky … but I also like working with little kids. So that’s what made me go into Family Consumer Science.” This allows her to teach at both the high school and preschool level. 

Since these are both very different environments, she had to learn how to manage classrooms with both highschoolers and little kids. “The key to that is building relationships. I feel like if you have a good relationship with your students, they will respect you, and they will want you to be successful as a teacher, just as you want them to be successful.” 

While she does an excellent job managing both classroom environments, she does run into some challenges. “I think it’s just a lot of work. I think people don’t necessarily think about it. It’s a whole other entity, like in the preschool here it’s like I’m the principal, I’m the secretary, I’m the teacher, I’m the therapist. There’s a lot of other things that kind of go along with that. So not only do I have to communicate with my own students and my students’ families, but I have to communicate with the preschoolers and their families.” 

As Mrs. Maldonado mentioned, being in this program is a lot of work and she takes on many roles as positions because she’s teaching preschoolers and high school students at the same time. “If I could add anything I would like to have, well selfishly for me, I would like to have an aide in the room to help with, like, worksheets or copies. There’s a lot to do, and because it’s just solely me and all these programs, I have to do so much, and there’s only so many hours in the day.”

Part of the work Mrs. Maldonado has to do with being in this program is making a curriculum for high school students that are taking the preschool course. “The curriculum is mostly about how to teach children focusing on what teaching looks like in a preschool setting, what it looks like in a K through five setting, what it looks like in a six through eight setting, and then what looks like in a high school setting, because all of those things are very different.”

During the first semester, students taking child development are given a curriculum and are learning how to make one on their own. Then in second semester students apply the skills they learned and make their own curriculum. After taking child development or human development, you can then take the preschool course. When taking the preschool course, the first few weeks are for the students to prepare, learn how to teach children, and understand what the kids should be developing. Then, students make their own lesson plan for the children. In September, the preschool kids start school. If it’s the students’ day to teach as in doing your lesson plan, they first have the kids sit on the carpet as they introduce the letter, number, or color of the week depending on which period you teach. 

Then the kids go to their stations, and at one of them the “teacher” is teaching the lesson plan they made. Students do this on every day of the week besides Wednesdays, but they are only the “teacher” twice a month. If you are not live teaching, you are paired with a preschooler to help them complete the stations. Over time you learn how to work with children and how to make lesson plans that are developmentally appropriate. As highschoolers learn to become a teacher for the preschoolers, Mrs. Maldonado is the teacher for her students.  

With being a high school teacher, working with preschool children, and dealing with her own kids back at home she still manages and does an amazing job. There is so much she does behind the scenes and on top of that is always there for her students in every way. “While it’s a lot of work I absolutely love my job.”