My son did not attend preschool. This fall he will start kindergarten. I have tried to teach him some of the skills that I thought he would need to be ready for kindergarten. He has been an eager learner and knows how to write his name, knows most of the letters of the alphabet, and can count to 20. What I am wondering is whether he has the readiness skills the teacher will expect him to have. Is there a checklist I can use to evaluate his readiness? I want to make sure that he is ready and gets off to a good start in kindergarten.
— Ready or Not
You are right to be questioning if your child is ready for kindergarten. You want him to be ready to learn from day one. Unfortunately, kindergarten is no longer the milk and cookies and playtime that it once was. In many school districts, it is a watered-down first grade. The kindergarten readiness checklists all now have an academic element as well as the more traditional social, emotional, and motor skills sections of the past.
If you search online for checklists, you will find a great number of lists. However, what you want to find out first is if your local school district has a checklist. This will be the best checklist for you to use. Another possible source is a state’s readiness checklist.
If you want to see if your child is ready to learn to read, visit the readingrockets.org website and search for the “Get Ready to Read Screening Tool.” It is a fast, free, research-based, and easy-to-use screening tool. It is designed specifically for children in the year before they start kindergarten. It only takes parents 10 to 15 minutes to give this test. Be sure to read what to do after using this test. This excellent website also has skill-building activities to help children get ready to read, as well as animated online games. All are designed to enhance their pre-reading skills.
One important thing for you — and all parents who are anxious to know if their children are ready for kindergarten — to remember is that children this age change rapidly. Skills that they may not yet have acquired this month may be solid in another few months. Just use a checklist as a guidepost for engaging in fun activities with your son to strengthen skills that are not as strong as they should be.
Parents should send questions and comments to dearteacher@dearteacher.com. To learn more about helping children succeed in school, visit the Dear Teacher website.
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