With summer almost underway, it’s a
good time for parents with children who will be entering kindergarten to start
preparing and orienting them for the classroom.
In Kindergarten, children will work on naming
upper and lower-case letters and matching those with their sounds. Practice in
this area is especially helpful.
Children will compare the adventures
and experiences of characters in familiar stories like fairy tales and folk
tales. This can be fun to do together.
Kindergartners also use a combination
of drawing, dictating, and writing to describe an event and include their
reaction to it.
They learn to recognize, spell, and
properly use those grammatical little words that hold the language together,
like “a,” “the,” “to,” “of,” “is,” and “are.” Helping them practice that will
make them feel more confident.
In math, they will count objects and
compare groups to tell which has more units. They will solve simple addition
and subtraction word problems, with sums of 10 or less.
Also, they will name shapes regardless
of orientation — if a square is oriented as a “diamond,” it is still a square.
Parents and children can both have fun
practicing these skills over the summer to help prepare for the coming school
year.
