What are the top ways to prepare your little for their big entry to Preschool & What will they learn in Preschool?
Throughout all time the question has been “What does my child need to know before they go to Preschool? Or Kindergarten for that matter. These are a few things that I’ve picked up along the way that have made preschool easier for children entering preschool. You don’t have to have a rocket scientist going into preschool but having at least some of these skills will help your child greatly.
Your child will learn these skills in most Preschools
Physical development – Large motor skills with body movements and small motor skills like hand and finger movements. Teachers help develop this using different activities. For Large Motor Skills - Running, jumping, throwing, and catching are some obvious ones. Many parents do yoga or other exercises with their children too. For Small Motor Skills – Painting, coloring, playdough, puzzles, scribbles to writing are a great way to gain fine motor skills.
Social Development – How well does your child get along with others? Respect and teamwork are the beginning of social interactions learned in Preschool. Working together, playing and learning with other kids helps build social skills, language and self-control. Conflict resolution can be part of the dynamic too. If your child has siblings, this is an easy one to work on. You have your own built-in depth conflicts and communication that you can practice at home. For those with only children like mine, anytime you take your child out to be with other children it’s an opportunity to have your child practice communication and the occasional conflict offers a chance to learn how to compromise.
Emotional Development – Getting your child comfortable with recognizing and naming their feelings is a huge step in development that helps with getting along in preschool and on the playground. Managing their own feelings and behavior builds self-esteem and confidence. Keep in mind this is something that toddlers through adults work on and is very important to help regulate social queues and conflict resolution. Trying new things is a great exercise to help build this skill. Your child may not be too excited to try something new like a new food or a new game but teaching them what feelings come up when something new is introduced and showing them how to handle the situation are great primers for preschool and life.
Language and Literacy development – Listening, reading, writing, talking are all skills that are connected. This also helps with spatial comprehension. These are things most preschools thrive at. You can begin the process at home even with scribbles and tracings. Tracing a picture of a dinosaur or an animal is just as important as tracing letters and numbers in building fine motor skills.
Thinking, Cognitive skills – Your child will develop these as they grow but beginning to problem solve and make decisions begins as soon as they exit the womb. They decide if they are hungry and cry. They decide they need mom and they express themselves by calling Mama to you. The complexity of thought brings exploration, questions and creative exploration. They reflect on this information and begin to understand the world around them. How your little one handles focus and frustration can help them learn. Help them develop this skill by offering interesting materials to use like Lego Duplo, Lincon logs, coloring books, drawing and puzzles then give your child plenty of time to explore them.
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What can you do to encourage the development of these skills?
Overall helpful tips:
- Find interests that your child has and introduce new words and concepts to them
- Encouraging them to use longer, more detailed sentences by adding to what they say in conversation
- Asking questions that require more than a yes-or-no answer and encourage thinking
- Begin to introduce rich and unusual vocabulary, and difficult words that are new to children
- Labeling shelves and bins in English and other languages children speak
Early reading:
Hearing the written word in song, with hand plays, poems rhyming and reading out loud helps them develop a rich vocabulary. Remember you are reading Pete the Cat to your child and almost all the words are a combination of words they’ve heard before along with some new ones and the rhyming creates a rhythm and cadence that they will easily remember. If you have books with their names, it keeps them entertained too. Using different voices for different characters is fun and educational too!
- When reading stories, talk about the story's characters, setting, plot, and connecting stories to real life in school or at home
- Offer materials to children that encourage writing or offer examples to trace writing
- Help children hear the differences in sounds and understand that letters have meanings and stand for sounds
- Playing rhyming games, singing songs, doing finger plays, and reading books with fun language
- Point out letters and words in books that are new or used in a new way
- And of course - learn the alphabet
Early writing:
Like I mentioned earlier, scribbles to trace shapes like squares, animals, to trace actual letters and words. This builds literacy and fine motor skills.
- Supply your child with a variety of paper and writing tools, like crayons, markers, and pencils. Add paints, acrylics, pastels if you like too. Writing in rice or sand is fantastic too!
- Introduce writing as part of their everyday activities. Draw lines and letters in the dirt on a hike.
- Have your little one create a story and write it down for them while they watch. Have them trace out the words or read the words they are familiar with. Each time they read they will add more and more words.
- Have your child spell words based on what they hear and what letters and sounds they know
Math:
Sorting materials and building things use math concepts like classifying and comparing. Even decorating something uses elements of math and symmetry and asymmetry. Exploring shapes and textures while making art uses the concepts of comparing and understanding attributes. When clapping to the beat of a song they are using counting.
- Provide different things like boxes, blocks, acorns, leaves to count, sort, compare, and make patterns
- Talk about math and point out the number of things you see while your child plays, during dinner, and while taking a walk.
- Encourage your child to bake with you or do recipes that require no oven time. Have them help with measuring, and counting how many cookies come out of the oven.
Science:
The act of asking thousands of questions is to learn about the world around them. Why is the sky blue? Why do birds fly and whales swim? Curiosity, discovery and questioning are critical scientific thinking. Problem solving and predicting outcomes is thinking critically.
- Have a basket of materials for your child to experiment with
- Research topics by reading books, looking up information online, taking field trips
- Ask your child to watch or ask about what’s happening and why
- Introduce science words into daily conversation or into different subjects
- Encourage children to be curious and ask questions, or to research questions.
Social Studies:
The act of learning to get along, make friends, and help with decisions are concepts of social studies. Your child learning about themselves and how they fit into their family, class and community is all social studies. Learning a foreign language and culture or even about other kids they play with is social studies. Sharing traditions, music, recipes are all forms of social studies too.
Creative arts:
Being able to express feelings and ideas through different ways like painting, dancing and pretending build storytelling and self-awareness. Creative arts can support any subject from writing, dancing, and trying to figure out how to keep snow from melting so fast are expressions of feelings and supporting subjects of all kinds. This opens little minds especially when you use playdough, building blocks, chalk or anything you can think of.
Technology:
This is a new one but just as important. Even in preschool. Your child can create art, read an eBook (or have it read to them), talk with another child and watch videos together with friends or family. Some learning games help children navigate to write. Some tools offered through technology assist with IEP at school in such cases as dyslexia, dysgraphia and other instances where technology can assist learning. Using technology to learn different languages, reading and research areas of interest are valuable ways to use technology.
NOTE: On technology –
This mama is not a fan of technology unless it is used well. It’s so easy to get drug down the rabbit hole. Be sure to investigate parental apps before you introduce your child to full on smart phones or other devices where kids can roam at will.
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