Get Your Kids Ready for Kindergarten with These Tips
If your child is old enough to start kindergarten, it’s a nervous time for a parent. You may have spent the last few years teaching them how to look after themselves and how to speak and use the potty, but as a parent, it takes a lot to be able to let your child go off to daycare when you’ve never done it before. Kindergarten is a whole new time of your child’s life, and while they are going to have an excellent time and enjoy themselves when they are there, it’s not always easy for a parent to let go.
Getting your child ready for kindergarten does take some time, and even with the most superior daycare options out there, children can still struggle to adjust. While many skills are required as a child is developmentally ready to achieve them, you can boost the skills that they already have, and there are several ways that you can do that, which will help with kindergarten readiness.
It doesn’t matter when they are due to start because it’s never too early to start practicing and preparing together. Let’s take a look at some things you could be doing as a parent to ensure that your child is well-rounded and ready for kindergarten.
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Read books together
Read books together. One of the most important things you could do with your children is to read with them from an early age. Their literacy skills and their imagination will build when you read with them.
You probably already read bedtime stories, but now is the time to start looking in depth at books and give them an idea of how books are composed to help with comprehension. Let your child handle the book and turn the pages so they can get a feel for what that’s like. Talk about the pictures in the story and the things happening so you can learn together.
Explore language
As much as possible, narrate your life with your child. Talk to them all day long about what they are doing or about what you are doing, and you’ll be able to build her language skills.
Take time for children to learn to speak, but once you start that ball rolling, it’s straightforward to keep it rolling. By working on their language skills from a young age, you can encourage your child to speak and learn to ask for the things they need when they need them.
Keep on top of fine motor skills
Work on things like holding pencils or scissors. The same goes for things like crayons and markers. Children who are heading to kindergarten need to have had enough exposure to these tools to be able to hold them correctly.
Cover the dining table with wallpaper and let them go to town with a different kind of instrument of cutting and sticking. Those fine motor skills can be then built on at kindergarten, and they’ll have a much easier time enjoying themselves.
Get Your Kids Ready for Kindergarten: Explore their independence
It doesn’t matter whether they go for a full day or they start off by going part-time, your child will be expected to spend time away from you and make decisions on their own at the same time. Don’t be afraid of this transition. You need to show your children that it’s absolutely fine for them to be away from you, and you can start them off gently and gradually by starting part-time, dropping them off, and then making sure that they understand that you will be coming back.
