Getting your child ready for kindergarten in today’s world is so much more than just teaching them the alphabet and how to use a glue stick. Activities that are fun, interactive, and engaging, are an easy way to incorporate kindergarten readiness into the daily routine and ensure that they are truly ready for kindergarten.
Why Parents as Teachers?
This site is oriented towards helping parents develop preliteracy and pre-math skills in 3 to 6 year old children to give them a leg up when they start elementary school. We see this as a form of home schooling that can stand alone or amplify what children are learning in preschool and kindergarten.
My Irish grandfather used to say that ‘every parent wants a small unfair advantage for their own child’. He didn’t mean this as a criticism, but rather as a reflection on the role of the parental/child bond that insures the survival of the species. Education was (and still is) is one of the advantages to which he referred.
Parents are important in this learning process for scientific and practical reasons. Since my grandfather’s day, we have learned a great deal about the role that genetics and early experience play in early learning. Both nature and nurture help to organize the development of brain circuits that form essential parts of higher cognition. These are circuits that will important roles in higher academic skills such as literacy, math, music, or art, as well as social and emotional skills related to empathy, cooperation, patience, introspection, attention, and planning. So early development of brain circuits involved in these skills is associated with increased academic success.
Most parents today are familiar with this general concept and look for practical ways to help their child reach their fullest potential. Acquiring preliteracy and pre-math skills prior to entering elementary skill is an important step in this process.
But what about teachers?
For parents with children in preschool, it’s commonly assumed that preliteracy and pre-math skills are best taught by teachers. But preschool teachers have 10-20 children of different backgrounds, capabilities, and emotional needs. Teachers also have a lot of material to cover with a whole child curriculum. So teaching abstract material involved in preliteracy and pre-math is more time intensive that other types of activities focused on socioemotional or physical development, and teachers have limited time to work with children individually.
Children also don’t naturally gravitate toward learning abstract information such as letters and numbers. It’s not concrete like swings, dogs, or lunch. Their interest usually comes from their parent’s interest and the child parent bond stimulates their curiosity and desire for approval. Moreover, the learning process in this area is not just a matter of rote learning for children, but rather through associating letters and numbers (or sigh words and sounds) with something they already know.
This is why a child’s best teacher of preliteracy and pre-math skills is usually a parent. For example, a child will often learn to recognize the word ‘dog’ when parents read a story about a dogs and point to the word when they come to it on the page. So parents and children reading together can be a great way for children to learn site words and other aspects of language as well.
Age appropriate cognitive, emotional and practical skills taught in preschool
1. Put together simple puzzles
2. Identify parts of the body (head, shoulders, knees, ankles, arms, legs, etc)
3. Draw self with head, body, arms, legs, hands, feet, facial features
4. Be able to state age and birthday
5. Recognize and label basic emotions in self and others (Happy, Sad, Angry, Surprise, Scared)
6. Tell full name when asked
7. Identify pictures that are alike and different
8. Be able to tell or retell a simple story
Preliteracy and pre-math skills taught in preschool
1. Know the letters of the alphabet (upper and lower case.
2. Identify basic colors: red, green, blue, orange, yellow, purple, pink, black, gray, brown
3. Recognize the numbers from 1 to 20
4. Count 10 or more items
5. Recognize first name by sight
6. Be able to recognize words that rhyme
Language and literacy skills taught in kindergarten
1. Rhyming (e.g. nursey rhymes)
2. Letter sound correspondence (basic phonics)
3. Counting 30 items or more
4. Recognition of common shapes (squares, triangles, etc)
5. Do simple addition
6. Recognize common sight words. *
* Sight Words vary widely across kindergarten classrooms. There is no accepted universal list. However, they generally consist of 50 to 100 common words that can be used to teach reading to children in school. Examples include run, jump, red, green, an, the, in, see, bed, up, down, go, walk, for, one, two, three, not, boy, girl, cat, dog. For additional sightword practice, use our Sight Word App