Kindergarten provides kids with their first experiences with structured learning. They learn numbers, letters, and shapes. They’ll also start to understand addition and subtraction up to the number ten.
They’ll learn to respect teachers and other adults, as well as work with peers on group activities. Friends will often fight, and figuring out how to resolve conflicts is a major part of this stage of development.
Social and Emotional Development
Parents can help kids prepare for kindergarten by encouraging their social and emotional growth at home. Practicing conversation, questioning and role play will help children develop skills they’ll use in school.
In kindergarten classrooms, teachers often spend most of their time engaging with groups of children, rather than working one-on-one with students. This allows them to supervise more students at once, and it also gives kids the opportunity to learn from each other.
As a result, many kindergarten-age kids are learning things like how to get along with others, how to follow a schedule, and how to solve problems. Education experts recommend that parents focus on helping their kids grow in these areas in preparation for starting kindergarten. Having these skills will help them be more confident learners when they go to school.
Physical Development
A child’s physical development is a key component of learning through exploration. It involves the growth of bones, muscles and coordination. It also helps develop cognitive and social skills.
Children in kindergarten are developing their large motor skills, or movement of the arms and legs, and their fine motor skills, or use of the fingers. Physical activities such as playing outside and working puzzles help improve these abilities.
Three-year-olds can pedal a tricycle and walk up and down stairs placing one foot on each step. They can run at a comfortable speed and turn while running. They can jump, throw a ball and catch it thrown to them. They can wash and dry their hands well. They can stand on one foot for a few seconds and balance while jumping over a low object.
Cognitive Development
Children’s brains are like sponges when they are young, and the more brain stimulation they get from family and teachers the more likely they are to learn academically. Cognitive development, which includes understanding, storing and communicating information is the cornerstone of learning.
Kindergartners are in the concrete operational stage of cognitive development, and this is when they begin to think logically and consider different perspectives. They also start to classify objects and sort them, such as putting colored pom-poms into matching containers or organizing a stack of books from tallest to shortest.
Help them to understand how things in life occur in a specific order, such as when they get ready for school in the morning or how a story goes from beginning to end. This helps them develop important life skills, such as sequence and order, which are also essential for reading. They also learn about number concepts such as more and less, as they sing along to ‘Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed’ or use a book with numbered illustrations that show how objects change positions from day to night.
Language Development
The development of language – children’s ability to understand (receptive) and use (expressive) oral language – is essential for cognitive advancement, as well as for developing social skills. It also supports literacy and reading comprehension. Children with smaller vocabularies are at greater risk of reading problems later in life.
Exposure to rich language, such as teacher talk and shared book reading, helps to enhance children’s language development. Providing opportunities for interaction among children also promotes language development, and activities that encourage peer learning – such as block-building, book sharing or carpentry – are particularly good for this.
By the end of kindergarten, children should be able to recognize and name all 26 letters in their alphabet (uppercase and lowercase), as well as 30 high-frequency words (or “sight words”), such as and, on, and, in. They should also be able to write some simple words and sentences. Help children learn the relationship between their first language and English, and support them by sending home books in their own languages.