Maria Kokorina

Kindergarten Teacher

IEC Oriental Sun Kindergarten • Temps plein

Sep 2024 - Sep 2026 • 2 yrs

Taught English to preschool children aged 2-4 at an international kindergarten, delivering all lessons fully in English. I planned every lesson myself and built the materials to go with them — flashcards, songs, TPR games and hands-on activities, each unit built around one topic children could see and touch. Worked alongside Chinese homeroom teachers in a bilingual team, and communicated progress to parents.

ESL Teacher

GRAFEN Educational Centre • Temps plein

Sep 2022 - Jul 2024 • 1 yr 10 mos

Taught English to children aged 6–10 in small groups at a private education centre, alongside their regular school lessons. These children already had English at school, so my job was to turn it into something they actually used: games, short projects, speaking tasks and a lot of repetition dressed up so that it didn't feel like repetition. Groups were mixed-level, and I planned every lesson so the slowest child could still join in and the fastest one still had somewhere to go. Parents were paying for these lessons directly, which kept the focus on visible progress — I tracked what each child could actually say, not just what we had covered.

ESL Teacher

Open English School • Temps plein

Nov 2020 - Aug 2022 • 1 yr 9 mos

Taught English at a private language school in both group and one-to-one lessons, working with several age groups - 3-5, 6-7, 8-10 - and with students at different levels in the same week. A large part of the teaching was online, and that changed how I built materials. No objects to pass around, no board to point at: everything had to work on a screen and hold a child's attention through it. I rebuilt my activities for that — digital flashcards, shared slides, tasks a student could see and respond to with nothing in their hands. One-to-one lessons meant planning for one specific learner at a time: their level, the thing they were actually stuck on, and whatever kept them talking.