Kindergarten is a very important time in a child’s education. It is the first formal schooling experience and marks a transition from home to a structured environment.
There is a lot to learn in kindergarten, including language, math and social-emotional skills. There are a number of things you can do at home to help your child prepare for kindergarten.
Language
A child’s oral language skills are essential for success in kindergarten. They develop these skills through exposure to stories, books, conversations and experimenting with words.
Children are like sponges on a biological level – they absorb new information unconsciously. This makes it easier for them to pick up a new language than adults can.
Kids who are exposed to a foreign language at an early age tend to have better reading, writing, memory and problem-solving skills than their monolingual counterparts. They also tend to do better on standardized tests, especially verbal sections.
These benefits show up even in babies as young as 12 months old! Studies also suggest that exposing children to a second language at an early age can enhance their social and emotional development.
Math
Kindergarten is the perfect time to help your child become familiar with math concepts. Learning basic skills like counting, addition and subtraction, and shapes can make all the difference in their later academic success.
Counting: Kindergarten students will learn to recognize and identify numbers up to 30 and understand that each object they count corresponds to a specific number in the counting sequence (one-to-one correspondence). They may also begin to skip count by 2s, 5s or 10s and work on understanding place value.
Addition and Subtraction: Your kindergartner will develop a ‘counting on’ strategy for adding and a ‘counting on or back’ strategy for subtracting. They will also learn how to compare two groups of objects and tell whether the group is greater or less than, or equal to, the other group.
Shapes: They will learn to recognize and describe 2D and 3D shapes, such as a circle, square, triangle, rectangle, and pentagon. They will use this knowledge to create simple and complex shape representations and explore the relationship between 2D and 3-D shapes.
Social & Emotional Development
The social and emotional development of children is important for their overall growth. It includes being able to share, taking turns, interacting more with peers, negotiating conflicts and controlling their emotions.
Children who have good social skills are more likely to follow directions, interact positively with others and be successful in school (Hyson 2004; Kostelnik et al. 2015).
Early care and education professionals play a key role in supporting young children’s social and emotional development. They build nurturing and responsive relationships with the children in their care, model respectful behavior and weave social-emotional skill-building into day-to-day activities.
Teachers are implementing Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) frameworks to support SEL in their classrooms. These frameworks provide a series of practices, interventions and implementation supports that help children learn the skills they need to be socially healthy. They also encourage educators to work with parents to build social-emotional competence.
Physical Activity
Physical activity is a key component of your child’s development. It helps them build a healthy body composition, strengthen bones and muscles, and improve their cardiovascular fitness.
Young children should be physically active every day. This can include fun aerobic exercises like running, hopping and jumping, swimming, riding bikes, or playing games.
They should also try new movements that they aren’t used to doing. For example, kindergartners can try to galloping, hopping, walking, running, jumping or leaping, skipping, or sliding.
Kids should be physically active for at least 180 minutes each day. This includes at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity.
Despite the fact that research suggests that one-third of Norwegian adults satisfy these health recommendations for physical activity, little is known about what these levels are among kindergarten staff. In this study, 43 kindergarten staff were measured with accelerometers and questionnaires.