The puppet-show area in Gema Campusano’s dual-language pre-K classroom has been reimagined as a restaurant, a laundromat and a tree, among other flights of fancy, as she and her students use crafts to set different scenes.

Campusano loves to incorporate visual art and original songs into her teaching to keep her students “engaged and enthusiastic about learning,” she said.

“You have to be able to teach them without explicit instruction,” Campusano explained. “That’s how they learn at this age, through play. And that’s what I love — it keeps me on my toes.”

Now in her fourth year as a teacher, Campusano fell in love with pre-K education when she was already well on her way to earning a master’s degree in school counseling. To support herself through school, she worked as a paraprofessional and found she enjoyed working in elementary classrooms.Her experience at the District 25 Pre-K Center in College Point, Queens, convinced her to change paths. Just a semester shy of finishing her school counseling degree, she decided to pursue a degree in early childhood education instead.

“My family thought I was crazy for starting over, but it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made,” she said.

In her dual-language classroom, Campusano delivers instruction in English and Spanish on alternating days for a mix of native Spanish and English speakers. She works alongside colleagues including Mary Ann Keighron, the school’s chapter leader. She was serving in Keighron’s pre-K class as a paraprofessional when she made the fateful decision to change her career trajectory eight years ago.

“It’s in her blood — her artisticness, her creativity and how she’s so in tune with the students,” Keighron said. “She always brings it back to them and their needs.”

A focus on children’s emotional safety is central to Campusano’s teaching philosophy. She immigrated from the Dominican Republic to New York City as a 2nd-grader and was initially placed in a monolingual general education class at PS 261 in Brooklyn. She felt like an outsider, and even now, she still vividly recalls the feelings of exclusion and loneliness.

Everything changed when Campusano was placed in a part-time English as a second language class. “The teacher was so loving, so nurturing, so respectful, she made me feel as if I were hers,” Campusano said. That sense of safety gave her the confidence as a child to “open up and learn.”

With her background in behavioral psychology and school counseling, Campusano believes the dual-language aspect of her teaching is intimately tied to social-emotional learning.

“Bilingual education not only supports language development, but it also builds confidence and a strong sense of identity,” she said. “It’s important for children to feel proud of their language and culture from an early age.”

She is grateful to the bilingual teacher who did the same for her as a child.

“When someone acknowledges you’re important, values your cultural differences and makes you feel included, that makes a difference in a child’s life,” she said. “Why not be that type of teacher to someone else’s child?”