Kindergarten provides children with valuable opportunities for social, emotional and academic development. At ages 5 and 6, kids begin to work out their differences with friends in a safe, structured environment where they learn how to respect each other and self-regulate.
They also start to understand abstract concepts, like comparing shapes and learning that the number 2 is two. Kindergarten classrooms often use math manipulatives that help kids grasp these concepts.
Social and Emotional Development
While academic learning is important, children also need to learn how to get along with their peers and regulate their emotions in a classroom. Without these skills, they may be less able to focus on their work and more likely to resort to behaviors like hitting or screaming in frustration.
A high-quality kindergarten will give your child opportunities to play with others and explore their creativity. For example, they might act out a story together, create art and architecture or mix different materials to make new things. Creating helps children think, imagine and practice how to follow instructions as well as solve problems.
While a teacher will help your child develop these social-emotional skills in the classroom, you can also encourage them at home. Try setting up a “school” for your kids and role playing situations that might occur in a classroom, like taking turns, lining up or respecting other people’s personal space. This can help your child build self-confidence and prepare for the transition to school.
Language and Literacy Development
Often referred to as kindergarten, pre-primary or reception (in Western Australia, South Australia, Northern Territory and Tasmania), children in this year are preparing for formal schooling. A lot of their learning is play-based and exploratory, but some is more teacher-directed.
This focuses on their literacy development, which includes their phonological awareness (the ability to discriminate and encode the sounds of language) and their receptive and expressive language skills. It also includes their understanding of the relationships between letters and their sounds and rhyming activities.
Children develop their communication skills by participating in interactive storytelling and discussions, encouraging them to ask questions and make connections with stories and real-life experiences. This helps them enhance their cognitive growth, enabling them to think critically and solve problems. It also fosters a sense of empathy and inclusion, supporting their engagement with other children and people in multicultural and multilingual settings. Language and literacy skills are essential for academic success.
Math Development
At this age, children begin to develop early math skills through play and exploration. They begin to measure items using informal methods (like their hands or blocks) and recognize simple patterns. They also learn how to compare and contrast objects, like larger versus smaller.
During kindergarten, kids start to learn to count and recognize numbers up to 10. They’ll also practice adding and subtracting mentally. Research shows that early number competence predicts mathematics outcomes over and above supporting cognitive competencies. (Jordan, Kaplan, Locuniak, & Ramineni, 2007).
Learning about patterns and sequences is crucial for developing math skills because they help kids understand the order and predictability of different events. For example, kids can work on patterning by bead stringing or putting LEGO pieces in a repeating pattern. They can also practice identifying and drawing symmetrical shapes. They can even start to create and interpret data with basic graphs. When kids get positive feedback from a teacher or parent for grasping a new concept, it can boost their confidence and encourage them to keep trying!
Science Development
Children possess a natural curiosity about the world around them, which can be an important catalyst for scientific exploration. However, left to their own devices, young children are not yet scientists—they need guidance and structure to turn their curiousity into rich scientific inquiry.
This kind of inquiry takes time: it involves planning, collecting and recording observations; organizing experiences; and exploring patterns and relationships that may lead to new questions. This approach mirrors how scientists work, and it also supports development of critical thinking skills that are important for all areas of learning and life.
In order to support students in constructing a deeper understanding of science concepts, kindergarten teachers need to provide a range of hands-on experiences. These experiences should focus on: