Pre-Academic Skills Your Child Needs for Kindergarten

ABCs, colors, numbers, sight words…parents have heard of the ‘push-down’ of academic skills – that Kindergarten has a lot of academics. Here’s how we think about it and how parents can help support.

Do

First, Kindergarten readiness consists of several aspects: social + emotional skills and pre-academic skills (and parent readiness and parent FAQs). But yes, pre-academics are a part of it.

Knowing the alphabet and recognizing or writing one’s name builds overall confidence about school. Having a child enter Kindergarten realizing that they do know many things can help a child decide, in the first few weeks, that they are good at Kindergarten. This is priceless.

Beyond developmental milestones and Kindergarten Readiness 101, we also think of pre-academics in terms of:

Cognitive skills
Confidence

Pre-Academic Skills

(PRINT ME!)

Skill	Readiness	What You Could Do
Cognitive skills: critical thinking and conversation	Emphasize these! We can’t underscore this enough. Having all the rote skills in the world will not teach a child to be a critical thinker. Grown-ups can have a significant influence in teaching their child cognitive skills at this stage of their early learning. Skills include: responding to open-ended questions, problem-solving, forming and verbalizing questions, explaining your thinking. Lots of reading and talking are the best ways to hone these skills.	Model, model, model! Practice asking questions while reading aloud, selecting groceries, chatting in the car, walking down the street. Always! Talk, talk, talk! Look for any opportunity to have conversation with your child. Ask your child open-ended questions – to which there is no right answer. Kindergartners have a deep need to do meaningful work. Give your child real-life problems to solve: Where is the missing button? How can we keep baby brother from getting into your pens? How many plates do we need to feed the whole family? Encourage your child to explain: 1) how they figured something out; 2) why they did it a certain way; 3) why it worked or didn’t work. Play games that involve strategy like Hoot Owl Hoot, Sorry and Blokus. Experiment with lab kits, which ignite lots of Q&A.
Confidence	Kindergarten can be intimidating, and 5-year olds especially, are deeply emotionally concerned with “being good” at things. So if things are difficult, it’s common for a young learner to put on a brave face or quit trying.	Teach your child the power of yet and building a growth mindset. Believing they can improve through practice helps a child persist through challenges. Set small, achievable goals with your child and celebrate their successes. It doesn’t have to be academic – doing the monkey bars is a great achievement! Support a healthy sense of autonomy and agency by building independent self-help skills, like zipping a zipper, clearing their dinner plate, tying their shoes, etc. Allow your child to make some meaningful decisions about their life (e.g., what to wear, what will the family eat for dinner Friday, what chores can be their job, etc.). Make the school a familiar place. Visit the school beforehand, walk around outside and inside, if possible.
Pre-reading	Letters, words and books are a central part of the learning and the magic of Kindergarten. And, for better or worse, sight words and more are now a standard part of Kindergarten curriculum. Pre-reading skills can help make Kindergarten literacy fun (and not scary!) Important skills include: recognizing letters and counting, recognizing one’s own name, writing one’s name in sentence case, visual discrimination (the ability to identify differences in visual images), tracking (the ability to efficiently move the eyes from left to right), phonemic awareness (hearing and discriminating letter sounds). A love of books and print is the most essential building block to reading.	Read! Read! Read aloud! Every day! Visit the library. Let children choose books to check out. (Reading aloud is important for comprehension.) Read books you loved as a child – your excitement is contagious. Underline words with your finger as you read aloud to support tracking and matching print to spoken words. Point out print everywhere – signs, labels, TV. Play “ABC scavenger hunt” as you drive or around the house. Write your child’s name on anything they make; label things in their room, their belongings. They should see their name many times a day! Play games like Memory, Slamwich, Spot It, Zingo and Set (with letters or pictures to match) to support visual discrimination. Emphasize letter sounds and make a game of guessing what letter things start with (phonemic awareness and letter sounds).
Number sense	Rote counting is a nice skill but nothing beats number sense! A fundamental grasp of what a number means and determining amounts, sets the stage for math learning in Kindergarten. We suggest focusing on understanding and problem-solving, and de-emphasizing memorization. Cultivating a love of numbers and of figuring out “How much?” is a priceless foundation.	Model, model, model – Ask “How much?” all the time. Wonder aloud, figure it out for yourself aloud and be visibly excited. Have your child count actual objects, while handling them. Start with amounts of 1-5 until those are very solid. Then, stick with 1-10 until that is strong. If counting by looking at things, or by tapping them with a finger, is hard for your child, have them move the object from one place to another while counting. Sensorimotor learners think with their bodies! Ask your child these 5 questions that encourage mathematical thinking so that you can identify specifically if / where they are having difficulty. Play games like Hi Ho Cherry O, Count Your Chickens, Swish and Sequence, or dice games like Qwixx or Math Dice Jr. Just about anything with dice is excellent for number sense. Bonus: games also teach coping with disappointment and waiting your turn, also key social + emotional readiness skills.

*Written in collaboration with Paige Abramson Hirsch, Kim Christensen and Doug Zesiger.

FYI – Independent Schools of the San Francisco Bay Area uses this checklist for student evaluation as a data point.

Spread the Love!

Do

Pre-Academic Skills

Be a Plinkit Pro