Is your child ready to begin school? Most adults remember kindergarten as a relaxed opportunity to learn the formal reading and math skills needed for first grade through guided play activities. However, because current public policy demands that schools meet higher standards, young children today often find themselves in increasingly rigorous academic programs beginning as early as kindergarten. This article will guide you to your child’s school readiness.
The concept of school readiness typically refers to the child’s attainment of a certain set of emotional, behavioral, and cognitive skills needed to learn, work, and function successfully in school. Unfortunately, this common philosophy of “ready for
school” places an undue burden on children by expecting them to meet the expectations of school.
A more constructive way to consider school readiness is to remove the expectations from the child and place those expectations onto the schools and the families. Young children have wide ranging needs and require support in preparing them for the high standards of learning they will face in elementary school.
Characteristics of School Readiness
Stated in simple terms, school readiness means that a child is ready to enter a social environment that is primarily focused on education. Research has suggested that many aspects of children’s lives influence their preparation for formal school learning, including cognitive, social, emotional, and motor development, and, most importantly, early home, parental, and preschool experiences. Consideration of school readiness must take into account the range and quality of children’s early life experiences, The following list of behaviours and/or characteristics are often associated with early school success:
What Parents Can Do to Help Prepare Children for School
Family environment is very important in shaping children’s early development, and parents can help their children develop the skills they will need to be ready for school.
The following list is a collection of activities that parents can do with their children to increase their child’s general readiness for school.
Promoting Readiness to Read
Children are ready to read when they have developed an ear for the way words sound, can identify rhyme and alliteration, can blend sounds, recognize onset rhyme (initial sounds), and can identify sound units in words. Together these skills are called phonological awarenessand usually emerge in children between ages two and six.
Children with good phonological awareness skills usually learn to read quickly.
Phonological awareness.There are many things that parents can do to facilitate phonological awareness and improve their child’s readiness to read:
Comprehension. Parents can build the following comprehension skills: attending to short stories by readingshort high interest books and reading the same favoritesover and over; connecting story and titles by predicting the story from the title; making predictions about stories and following simple plots by asking questions while reading (“What’s going to happen now?”) and allowing children to retell stories; and communicating feelings and ideas by allowing children to talk and tell stories even when they do not appear to make much sense.
Print awareness. Another important readiness skill that helps children learn to read is called print awareness. Print awareness means that the child:
Inclusion, learning environment including supportive parents, enriched home environment, and school curriculum are very important in shaping children’s early development.
Source: By Mary Ann Rafoth, PhD, NCSP, Erin L. Buchenauer, MEd, Katherine Kolb Crissman, MEd, & Jennifer L. Halko
Indiana University of Pennsylvania. www.nasponline.org