The salary for a daycare teacher is usually not very high, especially at first. It also depends on the training that the teacher has obtained in school and the number of years experience that the teacher has had. A daycare teacher job is a lot of work. Not only does the teacher have to plan lessons for children who are very young and have small attention spans, but she also has to set up all of the arts and crafts that go along with the lessons and clean up the area after the children are done with it. In addition, the daycare teaching job requires that the teacher is able to work with a wide variety of children from different home environments as well as learning styles. Since the daycare teacher is often the first teacher outside of the parents that the child has had, the teacher needs to make the experience enjoyable and worthwhile so that the child is excited to go to kindergarten when he or she is ready.
There are different ways that a daycare teaching job can be acquired. Often a daycare that is privately owned will hire people as assistants that do not necessarily have a teaching degree but are good with the children. In public daycare situations, the requirements are usually more stringent, requiring the assistants to have an associate's degree or to be going through an educational program at the time of hiring that person. In order to have a job as a full daycare teacher, there are certain educational and licensing requirements that must be fulfilled. Depending on the state and the daycare, the teacher will have to have an associate's degree and will have to pass the state's licensing exam in early childhood education. Usually the daycare teaching job will require the person to have at least a bachelor's degree and sometimes a master's degree, depending on the type of job for which the daycare is hiring. If the job is that of a master teacher, overseeing the lesson plans and teachers in the daycare, then the requirements are much more stringent.
During the schooling process, whether the person has received a degree in another field and then is adding to that degree with one in early childhood education, or if the person has started in education from day one, the end of the process is a student teaching period. During this time, the student gets experience in a daycare under a master teacher, learning from that teacher and taking more and more responsibility for the class as the semester goes on. At the end of the student teaching time, the student is teaching the class for an entire week or more by himself, thus showing that he is fully trained to handle a class of his own.
