When Your Child Ready For Kindergarten?

It is that time of year again. If you child is already 5 or will be turning 5 on or before Oct. 1 (date depends on your state) then it is time to start thinking about registering your child for kindergarten. However this is also the time that many parents begin worrying about whether or not their child is ready for kindergarten.

First, it is important to note that entry to kindergarten is based primarily on age. In most U.S. states that simply means that if your child is or will be 5 years old on or before Oct. 1 (date may vary in some states) then your child must start kindergarten that school year.



The good news is that most primary programs are designed to take children with a variety of social, emotional, and academic needs and work with them based on their strengths.

However we also know that children who start kindergarten with a good grounding in six skill areas have a head start and a higher success rate than children lacking these basic skills.

The skills that ease transition into kindergarten and help lead to a successful kindergarten year fall into these basic areas: cognitive skills, listening and sequencing, language skills, fine motor skills, social emotional skills, and gross motor skills.

Cognitive skills that will help your child be better prepared for kindergarten include the usual suspects such as knowing the alphabet, primary colors, shapes and being able to count to ten.

You should also work with your child to make sure she knows her phone number, address, birthday, and age.

Some emergent literacy skills also include being able to identify his own name in writing, writing his own name, answering questions about a story, understanding that words are read from left to right, knowledge of some nursery rhymes, recognizing written numbers, and vocabulary.



Listening and sequencing are also important skills and this includes the ability to follow simple directions, paying attention, retelling a simple story in sequence, repeating a sequence of sounds, and repeating a sequence of numbers.

In addition to the emergent literacy skills connected with cognitive skills, there are also language skills connected to relationships such as big and little, short and tall, more and less, up and down, top and bottom, in and out, over and under, front and back, and slow and fast.

While we often associate school simply with cognitive skills, it is important that children also have fine and gross motor skills as well as social emotional skills.

Fine motor skills include being able to tie shoes, hold crayons with fingers, copy a straight line, copy a vertical line, copy a circle, hold and use scissors correctly, cut on a line, button buttons, work a simple puzzle (six pieces), and zip clothing.

Gross motor skills include hopping, jumping, walking a straight line, skipping, galloping, throwing a ball or bean bag, catching, clapping hands, and kicking a rolling ball.

Social emotional skills include sharing with others, getting along with others, maintaining self control, verbal self expression, and the ability to take care of toilet needs independently.

If your child has all these skills mastered then they are well on the road to success in kindergarten. Don't worry if your child has not yet achieved success with all these skills. You can continue to work on the skills right up until the start of school and certainly after school has started you can team with your child's teacher.

Is Your Child Ready for Kindergarten?

When we think of going into the “preparation mode” as that first day of kindergarten approaches, the two areas we most focus on are the academic and the emotional. If your little one has conquered shapes, colors, counting and basic vocabulary, these are some of the academic skills that she should have as she heads off for that first day of formal school. You may have given her some home school or even preschool exposure to get those skills in place and all of that was good preparation for this big day.



From an emotional and social point of view, the big change from staying home with mom every day to being in an institutionalized setting is one that your child will cope with better with some preparation. So letting her meet the teacher, the other students, sit in on one day with you there and then have time to role play or talk through what it will be like all will be very helpful at reducing that feeling of disorientation that your kiddo may experience the first day at school.

But there are other areas of competency that you would do well to gauge in your child as she prepares for a day without you there to do everything for her. And if you start developing those check lists in the last full year before kindergarten, you have time to help your baby develop those skills well in advance. For example, when your child goes to lunch at school, she will probably go through a line to get her food, find a table on her own to sit with relative strangers to eat and have to get through meal time without guidance or encouragement. You can give her some of those experiences by eating at buffets where you let her handle her own tray and even pick the table and “be a big girl” by making all of the decisions.

The more independent your child becomes in that last few months before kindergarten, the more that feeling of self reliance will pay off when school starts. Being able to dress and undress herself is a basic skill that we work on with our children. And while this will not be necessary at school, there may be times when your child needs to go to the bathroom to adjust his or her wardrobe. And not having to have a teacher there with him will make this a much smoother operation.

The basics of being able to perform simple student tasks such as how to hold a writing implement, how to draw the basic shapes, how to color a picture and how to answer questions from the teacher without mumbling are things that can be worked on well before the first day at kindergarten that will make that transition much smoother for your child and for the teacher as well.



There are also mental or intellectual talents that your child can pick up just from being part of your family but they will be of great advantage in school. This includes being able to listen and understand a story and then ask intelligent questions about it, being able to understand humor and even make simple and appropriate jokes when the time is right in class and knowing the fundamentals of alphabet, numbers and vocabulary that will equip the child to start the curriculum at kindergarten without need for remedial help.

Observe and help your child develop the simple social skills of being able to enter a room and meet new people, understanding authority and rules and learning to live with them and making friends and identifying and avoiding problem personalities in class. These are skills that will go a long way toward facilitating a happy social life at school and learning to stay out of trouble which is a lifetime skill your kiddo will need throughout a long school career.

By thinking through not only the academic but the physical, hygiene, social, language and logical skills that are sometimes taken for granted, you cut down on the surprises that wait for your child on that first day at school. And the smoother that first day goes, the better her entire year at kindergarten will go which will lead to a happy and creative attitude toward school and education for life.