It’s a big deal when kids enter kindergarten—it marks the beginning of their formal education and first experience in an unfamiliar setting. This is also when many children begin to learn to read.
In a high-quality classroom, kindergarteners work on fine motor skills like using scissors and pencils, forming letters correctly and playing with clay. They also learn to recognize basic shapes and colors.
Social and Emotional Development
The social-emotional skills that children learn in kindergarten help them connect with others and learn. Those connections form learning pathways that are critical to their future academic success.
Children who have healthy social-emotional development are better able to focus and solve problems, and they are more likely to be engaged in their classroom learning. They also tend to have higher test scores than kids who struggle emotionally or behave aggressively in school.
In kindergarten, children become aware that everyone has different emotions, which helps them develop empathy for their peers. This allows them to solve conflicts with classmates and work as a team on group projects.
Role-playing common situations that your child will encounter in kindergarten, like being invited to join a game or sharing toys with friends, can help them practice their social skills. You can use a set of feelings cards to act out these scenarios, or create your own. For example, you might role play a conflict between two stuffed animals and have the kids try to solve the problem by taking turns or respecting personal space.
Language and Literacy Development
Many of the foundational skills children need to develop as readers are established in early childhood, including oral language abilities, alphabet knowledge, and understanding that print conveys a message. Research shows that children with rich language environments at home and school have greater literacy skills (Burns et al, 1999).
During kindergarten, teachers provide plenty of opportunities for children to interact with each other in group activities such as learning centers or a reading circle and to engage with long-term projects in social studies, science, math and English. These experiences help them become confident and successful learners.
During this time, it is critical to create structures that allow preschool and district kindergarten teachers to share information about students. This will ensure that kindergarten teachers have a clear picture of children’s previous language and literacy experiences and are able to build on them. This can be done by providing standardized formats for sharing data on language and literacy development between preschools and kindergarten teachers.
Math
Increasing the amount of math children learn in kindergarten can be difficult. Educators worry that pushing them beyond the basics of counting and recognizing numbers will be perceived as unpleasant work that takes away from other learning activities.
Kindergartners can start to solve addition and subtraction problems that involve physical objects, and can compose and decompose numbers within 10. They also learn about patterns, noticing them on things like the kitchen tiles in their home or on a butterfly’s wings.
Understanding these patterns helps students build analytical thinking, which is important for later math development, such as logical reasoning and problem solving. Research shows that kindergartners’ number competence — their ability to understand number quantities, their relationships to each other and to groups of objects (like 4 and 2 making 6), and how to sort numbers into lower and higher sets — predicts their achievement on the Woodcock-Johnson III Achievement Tests-Mathematics in third grade. This is a stronger predictive factor than their age.
Science
Science development in kindergarten is about encouraging children to ask questions and explore the world around them. It’s also about introducing them to the tools they will use to learn more about the world, such as observations and measurement.
Froebel believed that doing science was an essential part of young children’s work and play. He designed a kindergarten curriculum using a variety of gifts and occupations to give children the opportunity to directly explore phenomena that were relevant to their lives.
For example, kindergartners can experiment with a simple machine (the pulley) to discover its lifting power or observe the movement of snails in a tank. They can also learn about chemical reactions through a classic experiment—making a volcano out of clay or play dough and adding baking soda and vinegar to see it explode!
PLTW Launch kindergarten STEM lessons align with Next Generation Science Standards and are carefully designed for students to understand the big ideas. They include age-appropriate interactive activities, songs, characters, and literacy skills. They are perfect for center time or whole class lessons.