Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Practicing Kindergarten skills

Radio Commentary

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.