|
Hello parents and caregivers,
This is the last newsletter before I start sending monthly calendars with daily activities you can do with your child to help them get ready for kindergarten. I will say this again next month, but I hope you will see these calendars as a place to get ideas and not as a prescription of tasks you must complete. If you do one of the activities a week, a couple over the month, almost all of them, or none of them, your child will be okay! Just the fact that you signed up for this newsletter and are reading it tells me you care about your child's development and making their transition to kindergarten as smooth as possible, which means you are doing a great job! In fact, you may find that many of the activities I list on the monthly calendars are things you already do or have done.
You will notice that there are some things that are NOT on these calendars, such as worksheets, flash cards, apps, or "enrichment"/academic classes that promise to teach your child to read. Some children (not many), are excited about learning to read and are ready for that before they enter kindergarten. But most children are not developmentally ready to read until age 6 or 7, and pushing them to do so can actually turn them off to reading (and learning in general) by making it seem like a chore and/or make them feel bad about themselves and their abilities and therefore making it harder for them to learn to read.
If you have been doing flash cards or worksheets with your child, no need for guilt! If your child likes these activities and asks for them, then it's okay to keep doing them, just be sure your child knows it's just for fun. And if you have been initiating them, you can simply stop and take the pressure off yourself and your child. As we have covered in previous newsletters, the most important skills children need to succeed in kindergarten are social-emotional and self-help skills.
One thing you can do to help your child get excited about reading and ready to read in kindergarten or 1st grade is to read with them every day, and when you read, talk about the book and ask questions. Below you will find a couple of lists of books about starting school and social-emotional skills for children, as well as a description of dialogic reading, which is a fancy educator term for having a conversation with your child as you read, and is shown to improve children's reading readiness skills such as print awareness, comprehension, and fluency.
Ellie
| 
