Kindergarten is an important milestone for kids that marks the start of their formal education. Most of their day consists of teacher-directed instruction in reading and math.
Kindergartners also learn about the world around them, including other cultures and how they’re similar and different. This helps their cognitive development.
They also learn to recognize upper and lowercase letters, their sounds and how to write.
Social and Emotional Development
Kindergarten is typically the first time children spend long hours away from home and parents. It’s also the first opportunity for kids to learn and develop social skills in a large group without direct parental supervision.
Kindergartners are expected to follow classroom routines, get along with their peers and express their emotions in healthy ways. Children who don’t have strong social-emotional skills may struggle at school, resorting to destructive behaviors like hitting and screaming to express their frustration.
To prepare kids for a classroom setting, role play social situations they might encounter, such as taking turns or lining up. You can even use stuffed animals to practice simple conflicts that might occur in the classroom, such as someone cutting in line or someone not sharing. Having children practice how to solve these problems can help them succeed in the classroom.
Language and Literacy Development
As they grow up, children develop their language and literacy skills by reading and talking with adults. They also learn through play and through their daily interactions with the people around them.
By kindergarten, kids are typically learning their letters and basic numbers. They’re also beginning to put their letters together to make words, which may look like scribbling to an adult but are the early stages of writing.
Parents and teachers are the chief resources in helping kids gain language and literacy skills. Reading regularly with children and allowing them to choose books helps them view these experiences as enjoyable and motivating.
Kids should continue to have opportunities for rich, spoken language, and the National Early Literacy Panel has shown that dialogic reading, where teachers talk about what is being read, is a powerful strategy for supporting language development with young children. This approach is especially effective with dual language learners.
Physical Development
At this age, children are still developing both their gross (large) and fine motor skills. They can run and balance on one foot, throw and catch a ball, and can draw simple shapes.
They understand more about the world around them, such as recognizing the seasons and weather patterns. They can also count objects, group them into groups according to size or color and sort items by type, such as blocks or legos.
They are starting to write and read, and can identify uppercase and lowercase letters as well as match them with the sounds they make. They are also beginning to learn to recognize and write numbers, as well as to compare quantities and shapes.
While there is no set age at which a child should start kindergarten, it’s helpful to have a general idea of what kinds of skills kids at this age should be developing in order to succeed. Use the checklist below to help gauge your child’s readiness for kindergarten.
Cognitive Development
Cognitive development includes the reasoning, memory and thinking skills that help young children understand and organize their world. Kindergarten students work with a wide range of open-ended toys and games to promote problem-solving, decision-making and creative thinking skills. They also begin to use a variety of math and science activities that require higher level thinking, such as measuring height, sorting groups of objects and understanding the difference between factual events and fictional stories.
During this period, your child will learn to recognize and write numbers, as well as identify basic shapes. They may also start to categorize objects, such as putting books into the correct order or grouping toys and food by color.
A central issue in developmental research is the manner in which children and their environments collaborate to shape development. This issue is most clearly presented in the two primary cognitive-developmental traditions. The structuralist approach, influenced by Piaget and others, emphasizes the active organism trying to control his environment, while the functionalist approach, influenced by information processing theories, tends to overlook this role.