Kindergarten is the first step toward children realizing their potential and reaching their goals. It is an educational approach that emphasizes playing and practical activities such as drawing to prepare children for school.
By the 1920s, kindergarten advocates worked tirelessly to alter state policies and secure resources that would allow for its integration into public school systems. Several regional histories from the Association for Childhood Education describe these efforts.
Social and Emotional Development
Among the most important skills for children to have as they enter kindergarten are social-emotional. Students with healthy social-emotional development are happier, more interested in learning, have a positive attitude toward school, and often perform better academically than those who don’t.
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that social-emotional skills can have just as profound an impact on a child’s ability to learn as letters and numbers. This is why teachers are increasingly emphasizing the importance of preparing kids for the social-emotional transition to kindergarten.
Parents can help their preschoolers and kindergartners get ready by practicing their skills with them. They can role-play simple problems that kids might encounter in a classroom, like sharing with their peers or following directions. They can also play with stuffed animals and practice expressing their emotions in positive ways.
Math
Kids entering kindergarten are often getting their first taste of structured learning, and it can be a lot to take in. Building math skills early can help them adjust to the classroom and thrive at school.
Kindergarten math includes recognizing numbers and shapes, counting objects, and basic addition and subtraction. Other important concepts include patterns and measurement. Kids learn to identify and create repeating patterns, such as the beads on a necklace or LEGO pieces, and sort and classify items by size, such as comparing lengths of toys.
Kindergarten number competence is predictive of first-grade mathematics achievement. However, the relationship is moderated by income. In particular, low-income children enter kindergarten with less number-related experience at home and in their communities than middle-income children. This gap in experience may explain why the correlation between kindergarten and first-grade number competence is smaller for these students than it is for their peers.
Science
Children are naturally curious, and a good homeschool curriculum aims to cultivate that curiosity. Nurturing their questions and providing them with a space for exploration fuels learning.
Young students are capable of learning about science concepts that seem complicated, especially when presented through familiar, everyday experiences and in child-friendly language. They learn the parts of a plant and how it grows, for example, and observe water’s physical changes, such as freezing and melting.
Moreover, they learn about the needs of living things and compare them to their own. They also explore the concept of force by building with blocks, using a lever and pulleys, or taking a field trip to observe planets and stars in our galaxy. Power Homeschool offers Kindergarten science courses that incorporate these essential skills into fun, hands-on activities that foster your student’s innate sense of wonder.
Language Arts
Language arts can feel overwhelming because there are so many different aspects to learn. They include handwriting, phonics, reading, literature study, spelling, grammar, creative writing and more.
You will also work with your children on dictation, which is when they write what you read out loud. This is a great way to develop spelling and grammar skills at this age too!
For younger children, keep your teaching times short — kindergarteners have limited attention spans. Try to spend no more than 10 minutes a day on phonics-type activities. Also continue to READ ALOUD to your children every day!
You should start to introduce prefixes, suffixes and word roots at this time too. CKLA follows the Core Knowledge Sequence and provides a comprehensive Teacher Guide with background information, daily lesson plans, read alouds, assessments and more.
Music
Music provides children a natural way to move and explore their bodies. It helps support gross motor development as they clap, bounce, dance, walk and stomp to music. It also helps develop their sense of rhythm and spatial awareness.
Musical activities allow children to practice cooperation and collaboration, a necessary skill in kindergarten and life. They learn to sing and dance together, working out difficulties while having fun. They become proficient at humming melodies and doing hand gestures that go with songs even if they can’t say the words.
Music connects children with their culture and is a powerful tool for emotional regulation. Lullabies and folk songs can help a child feel safe, secure and loved. They also provide a means of passing down cultural traditions to younger siblings.