Kindergarten is an important first step in a child’s formal education. It’s a time for kids to learn and grow in new environments with friends and teachers.
Kindergarteners also start to recognize shapes, sort toys, and learn basic counting skills. Help your child understand these concepts by playing games that focus on identifying and sorting, like separating syllables into groups or blending individual sounds to form words.
Social and Emotional Development
The social-emotional development that children learn in kindergarten helps them get along with others. Teachers help them understand and regulate their own feelings, develop close relationships with others, and solve problems together.
They also practice ways to show empathy toward other children and adults, such as by talking about how a friend feels or acting out situations like resolving a disagreement. These skills lead to better problem solving, teamwork, and focus, which all support academic achievement.
Because of their social-emotional development, kindergartners are ready to transition to more structured academic learning in first grade. This can help them meet the rigorous standards of the Common Core, building on what they learned in TK or preschool. They are also prepared to adapt to the longer school day.
Physical Development
Physical development is the overall growth of a child’s body, which includes improvements in their motor skills. It is important that children have a healthy level of physical development as it supports other domains of learning.
During the kindergarten year, children’s fine motor skills develop as they gain more control over their fingers and hands. This enables them to engage in activities that require detailed hand-eye coordination, like stacking small blocks or holding and using writing tools.
Kindergartners also develop their gross motor skills as they become more capable of moving their bodies through play and other physical activities. This allows them to jump, hop and skip and explore their environment more freely. They can also usually identify and name seasons and the days of the week.
Literacy and Numeracy Development
A child’s kindergarten year marks a significant transition from the more flexible learning environments of preschool to a structured academic environment. This shift is often reflected in the focus on formal academic skills like literacy and math.
Literacy development includes mastering the alphabet and recognizing upper- and lowercase letters, identifying words, and beginning to write their own names. Numeracy development encompasses counting, recognizing numbers and shapes, and basic addition.
Early childhood teachers and parents can facilitate children’s early numeracy abilities by engaging them in activities that promote these important skills. For example, using concrete objects to help children understand number sense can be a powerful way to teach them the relationship between quantity and size, and allowing them to play with numbers through games and other activities can promote their understanding of these concepts.
Similarly, a strong number sense is an important precursor to developing fact fluency, which also helps children master multiplication and division facts. A recent study found that kindergartners who performed well on a test of their intuitive number sense were more likely to achieve fact fluency in grade 1 than those who performed poorly.
Identity Development
Children’s identity development is influenced by interactions with others, including peers and teachers. Developing a sense of self-worth, a positive view of one’s future and strong social bonds can help children cope with adversity, particularly in times of stress.
Encouraging children to develop their identity by discussing family history, introducing them to different cultural traditions, or encouraging them to craft their own art can foster an appreciation of their unique heritage. Children can also develop a sense of their own identity through storytelling, using pictures to represent themselves or to illustrate stories about other people in their lives.
In Australia, kindergarten is known as kinder or pre-primary and may be referred to as preschool, while in Victoria, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory it is called prep (preparatory) before entering year 1. In the Netherlands, kleuterschool is non-compulsory day care for children aged three to six years before they start primary school. The country also offers privately run, subsidized nurseries and crèches.