Kindergarten is a major milestone in children’s education. It’s when curiosity meets structure and early learning begins to take shape.
Kids learn everything from identifying their own feelings to understanding the cultural traditions of other countries. And they can learn a lot just by playing, coloring and interacting with their peers!
Social Skills
Kindergarten is a critical time for developing social skills, especially sharing and taking turns. Kids learn to communicate with others, recognize emotions, de-escalate conflicts and adapt to new situations.
Toddlers, preschoolers and kindergarteners are often egocentric, meaning they tend to focus on their own needs and wants. This can make it challenging for them to share, empathize or cooperate with their peers.
Researchers analyzed data from kindergarteners to identify distinct growth trajectories in their social skill development and determine related predictors. They used latent class growth analysis to clarify these trajectories and explore how home-rearing environment and demographic characteristics affected children’s social skills during kindergarten. These results suggest that teachers can screen students to see which ones need help with these skills. They can then target them for more intensive interventions to prevent future problems.
Language Skills
Language skills play a pivotal role in children’s cognitive abilities, enhancing communication and social interactions. Strong language abilities also support academic achievement, preparing children for reading and writing.
Nurturing linguistic development begins with daily conversation, and parents can play a critical role by providing rich and varied vocabulary and sentence structures. Prompting children with open-ended questions encourages thought-provoking responses and strengthens processing skills that facilitate language growth. Engaging in routine activities together teaches children to categorize, count and use descriptive language, turning everyday events into learning opportunities.
Embracing multilingual approaches enriches children’s vocabulary and promotes cultural awareness, giving them an advantage for future international travel and interactions with people from different backgrounds. If your child struggles with speech or language issues, consider partnering with a pediatric speech-language pathologist.
Math Skills
Kindergarteners build early counting and number sense skills. Counting is the foundation for more complex math concepts like addition, subtraction, and place value. They also learn to recognize and create patterns (e.g., ABAB, red-blue, red-blue) that can help them understand what comes next in a sequence.
Understanding and comparing quantities is another important skill that kindergarteners learn. For example, they may learn about more than and less than through activities like sorting toys or ingredients in a kitchen.
Daily math review is also essential for kindergarteners to develop fluency in key areas such as addition and subtraction, and shapes and sizes. You can find daily math reviews with graphical word problems for kindergarteners on Brighterly, a personalized learning platform designed by experts to ensure students get the practice they need.
Science Skills
Science process skills, such as observing, making predictions, classifying and testing, are vital for learning about the natural world. While some of these skills may seem instinctive to children, students often need to be taught how to do them properly and effectively.
Observation is one of the first skills to develop, and it can include both the big picture (colors and shapes) as well as fine details such as pollen or a plant’s leaves. Other science process skills are more challenging to learn, such as predicting results, interpreting and forming a conclusion or controlling variables during an experiment.
Fortunately, our kindergarten STEM curriculum is designed to help your child build these important skills at their level of understanding. With math and literacy incorporated into each lesson, children get the chance to develop critical thinking, reasoning and problem-solving skills that prepare them for future science studies.
Physical Skills
Children develop their physical skills in kindergarten by climbing, playing games, and enjoying outside activities. They also enjoy movements that require increased coordination, such as jumping and hopping.
By this age, children are able to stand on one leg for a few seconds and ascend stairs using the alternating step pattern. They can hold a pencil with a tripod grip, draw simple lines and shapes, and manipulate small objects like buttons and zippers.
Our research suggests that higher compliance with best practice indicators relating to PA affordances in kindergarten is related to children’s motor competence. This is an important finding, as it is an indicator of the quality of kindergarten environments. Children in KG-high met 23% of the EPAO-sr PA affordances, while those in KG-low only met 0%.