Children are the key to the future, but who’s going to educate them? Luckily, early child education is a growing field that provides a secure salary. Even better, it’s now possible to get your degree completely online, from the comfort of your own home. Sounds interesting? Here’s everything you need to know about getting a degree in child education online!
Is Early Child Education Right For You?
So just what’s involved in early childhood education? And what do you need to be good at? If you’re going to explain things to young children, you’ll need great communication and listening skills. Being service-oriented is helpful too, since you’ll be spending your career helping others. You’ll need to have dependability and integrity, since you’ll be a role model and a source of support for the young children you teach. But you’ll also need to be adaptable. Young children are constantly changing and growing, and an environment that has lots of them interacting with each other can be unpredictable.
Finding The Right Program
If you think you’re up for the challenge, the next step is to start looking into programs to learn early childhood education. Your best bet is to choose accredited online colleges for early childhood education.
Why, you might be thinking? There’s a few different reasons why an online child education degree is the best kind of child education degree. Instead of shaping your entire life around the degree, you can shape the degree to fit around you. You won’t have to move to attend classes. You can watch pre-recorded lectures whenever it suits you, and work on assignments on the way to other things in your life. Online colleges for early childhood education let you get the skills you need for your new career at a pace and timetable that suits you.
Careers With An Early Child Education Degree
Where do online colleges that offer early childhood education lead you? What’s the next step, and what kinds of schools can you teach at with a degree like this? The three main areas early childhood educators can teach in are preschool, montessori schools and kindergartens.
Preschools are mostly private schools that work to be a child’s first experience with formal education, and stimulate their curiosity and growth for life. Classroom sizes are kept small, and teaching as well as the decoration of the classroom is lively and engaging.
Montessori schools, like preschools, are interested in stimulating early learning, but their methods are very different. Multiple age groups learn in the same environment, and children set their own pace of learning. The classrooms are set up with different areas devoted to each individual subject, that children can move between freely.
Kindergarten, meanwhile, is the next step on from this, and is integrated into the main school system. You’ll be teaching kids aged around five or six, and will need a public school licence.
What Qualifications Do I Need?
So what kind of qualifications do you need to teach in these types of settings? Obviously, online colleges for early childhood education are where you’ll find them. But colleges offer lots of different kinds of programs that can be hard to tell apart. An associate’s degree in early childhood education usually takes two years of full-time education, and if you want to continue on to a bachelor’s, they usually allow transfer. An online early childhood education bachelor degree program usually takes four years of full-time education, although this can be less if you’ve transferred from a relevant program. If you have a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education, you could move on to a master’s. This will give you higher earning potential than if you have a bachelor’s.
Wrapping Everything Up
Of course, when making important career and educational decisions, it’s always important to do your own research. Take your time, and think over the options in front of you. But remember that an online child education degree could be the thing that transforms your life. If you get into early childhood education, you could have job security, steady wages and a way to truly make a difference in your community.
References
- “Early Childhood Education”, Teach.com, accessed 8th April 2021, https://teach.com/careers/become-a-teacher/where-can-i-teach/grade-levels/early-childhood/#where.
- “Early Childhood Education Degree Programs”, Teacher Certification Degrees, accessed 8th April 2021, https://www.teachercertificationdegrees.com/degrees/early-childhood-education-degree/.
- “Bachelor Programs in Early Childhood Education in USA 2021”, Keystone Bachelor Studies, accessed 8th April 2021, https://www.bachelorstudies.com/Bachelor/Early-Childhood-Education/USA/.
- “Early Childhood Education”, Teachers’ College Columbia University, accessed 8th April 2021, https://www.tc.columbia.edu/curriculum-and-teaching/early-childhood-education/.