How To Prepare a Kid for Preschool
Kindergarten was once the beginning of the school years. Now, it is generally acknowledged that a child will not be ready for the academics of kindergarten without attending a preschool. Parents must begin working with toddlers to ensure that they are adequately prepared to enter a preschool around age three or four.
Preparation for preschool is not heavy on academics, but rather foundations for learning. Your child may have the alphabet and colors down by the age of three, but those who don’t will catch up quickly. It is far more important to focus on numerical sense, reading fundamentals and behavior for learning.
Numerical Sense:
Recent brain research has shown that basic number sense can have a huge impact on a child’s overall success in mathematics throughout their life. Number sense is understanding that numbers are sequential and identifying that a bigger number represents more. This is a foundation that must be instilled by around age four to be adequately implanted for future use.
To help your child learn number sense, continue doing what most parents already instinctively do. Help your child count his pennies or blocks. Rather than just saying the numbers, point or move the pieces to help him understand what one, two and three look like. You can even go so far as to count backwards and remove the blocks or pennies. Popular board games are an excellent way to teach numerical sense as well. Anytime you count spaces or toy ants or dots on a dice, you are building a mathematical foundation.
Reading Fundamentals:
Teaching a child to read before age five is possible if the child is developmentally ready. Whether a child can read by five or not is not as important as having reading fundamentals in place. The foundation for reading begins before a baby is born. There is a strong correlation between the number of books owned by parents and the future reading ability of their children. This is a much stronger relationship than if the parents read to their child.
Of course it is important to read to your child, but simply having books around the house shows how important the written word is and leads by example, in a sense. To build reading fundamentals, parents should focus first on vocabulary. Reading together is a wonderful way to do this. You can also simply speak to your baby or toddler in your normal voice and narrate your activities. The more words a child is exposed to, the greater his own vocabulary and understanding will be.
Read to your children and point out things in the pictures. Talk to them and explain why things happen or what you are doing. Take the time to show them different things and let them explore while you give them names and explanations. Later, after your child has picked up decoding skills, or the first step of actually reading words, he will know what those words mean. Strong readers can both sound out words and picture or understand what the word is saying. For this reason, the larger vocabulary and more exposure a child has to the world around them, the better their reading comprehension will be.
Behavior for Learning:
It is obvious that a place for learning does not closely resemble a playroom or gym. Children who have very little discipline often struggle when first introduced to concepts such as “taking turns” or “sitting still.” Parents should be working with their children from infancy to teach them patience and self discipline. Granted, toddlers are not known for acting like ideal pupils. But practice and setting expectations can go a long way in learning to follow instructions, whispering, listening to the teacher and the hardest of all – sitting still.
(No Ratings Yet)
Posted in Education, Pre-School and Day Care
