Kindergarten – Building a Foundation For Future Learning

In kindergarten, children learn fundamental skills and build a foundation for social, emotional, literacy and cognitive growth. They also start to learn about their community and how people near and far are similar or different.

Children learn to identify lowercase and uppercase letters and the sound each makes. They also practice writing and read simple books.

Social and Emotional Development

Children develop social-emotional skills that support their ability to engage in school learning. These skills include the capacity to express their emotions and follow directions. They also learn to work and play cooperatively with others. Healthy social-emotional development lowers the occurrence of problem behaviors and improves test scores.

Kindergarten provides children with a variety of opportunities to develop their social-emotional skills, such as managing separation from home and family members, learning to be independent and developing the courage to ask for help. Teachers also teach important life skills, such as sharing and coping with frustrations and fears.

Using the theoretical framework of Rogoff’s (2003) notion of guided participation, the authors examined how kindergarten teachers supported their students’ social-emotional development. Observations were conducted in eight classrooms across three districts, involving 130 kindergarten children and their teachers. Participants were mainly from low-income communities. The research analyzed the implicit and explicit exchanges, distal arrangements, and teacher-student interactions that characterized guided participation (Wiersma & Jurs, 2009). Each participant was observed one to two times per month for 1 to 2 hours.

Language and Literacy Development

Children begin to develop literacy skills in kindergarten, including learning how letters represent sounds and how print conveys a message. They also build oral language through play and learn how to communicate with others using words. The development of these skills is key to future reading success.

Teachers should make reading and writing part of everyday activities and routines in the classroom, such as at snack or naptime. Teachers should also make sure to provide opportunities for children to engage in home literacy practices, which can be important to their reading and writing success.

Parents can help their children develop early literacy skills by providing them with books in their home language. This helps to build a connection between what they already know in their first language and English and accelerates the speed at which they acquire new knowledge. It also supports children’s ability to read and write in both their home language and English.

Thinking Skills

When children learn, they must think with the information they’re given. Critical thinking is the ability to analyze, compare and contrast information to make informed decisions about what to do next. Developing critical thinking skills is a crucial part of kindergarten.

This stage of development also marks the beginning of abstract or symbolic thought. You may see 5-year-olds using objects to represent something else or mime an action without a prop. This is why it’s so important to encourage their dramatic play and allow them to create their own stories.

It’s also a great time to promote open-mindedness and empathy by exposing them to different cultures, backgrounds, and experiences. This will help them develop critical thinking skills when they encounter new ideas, opinions and perspectives as adults. Nurturing their curiosity, asking age-appropriate questions, and encouraging them to question “why” will all help to foster these vital cognitive skills. Parents can also model the process for making decisions by sharing how they go about evaluating options and information throughout the day.

Math

In kindergarten, children start to develop a solid foundation in math. They will learn to recognize and write numbers, practice number relationships, and understand how quantities can be combined and broken apart (greater than/less than). Kindergartners also begin to learn about money, shape recognition, and basic patterns. They will begin to solve addition and subtraction problems with physical objects, then move on to using picture representations of these problems as well.

They’ll learn to sort, classify, and order objects based on their features, including color, size, and shape. They’ll be able to count objects up to 30 and identify without counting how many items are in a small set. They’ll also learn to use simple graphs to represent and compare information. Research shows that high-quality kindergarten math instruction should build on children’s intuition and informal knowledge of the world around them. It should help children progress toward college and career-ready skills, including adding and subtracting.

Kindergarten – Building a Foundation For Future Learning
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