Mar 23 2009
Let’s Get Ready For Kindergarten!
Here are the 7 things kids will be tested on in their first Kindergarten assessment test:
- Know the uppercase alphabet and name the letters out of sequence or mixed up, such as: B, D, X, K, J, M, O, etc.
- Know the numbers to 0-10 and identify the numbers out of sequence or mixed up, such as: 2, 5, 9, 8, 1, 3, 4, etc.
- Identify basic colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.
- Identify basic shapes: circle, diamond, rectangle, triangle, oval, and square.
- Identify basic coins: penny, nickel, and dime.
- Count objects to 10.
- Show how far they can count toward 100.
Make learning this fun!!! Practice this information when driving with your child, searching for shapes, colors and letters to make learning interactive. Counting is a great activity for bath time. Shopping with your child is a great time to practice coins. Empower your child to get ready for Kindergarten!
Some more tips to help include these seven things in your daily living with your youngsters:
- Pick out shapes, one a day, in a room. First, print a circle and hang it up in that room and then all day, find that shape in the room and make a list. Go slow to begin with, perhaps one shape a week.
- For the grocery store, give each child their own list (around ages 3-5), that they had to pick out themselves, find the price and write it down on their list paper. If we just had a few things to buy, one child would stand up by the register and read the price of the item as it was scanned - sometimes, the checker even let the kids scan the items themselves!
- For ABC letters, use the newspapers - a different letter each day. By dinner, the kids must choose one page and circle all of that letter (upper- and lower-case letters being separate).
- Kids count change each day when hubby comes home from work - one child counts per day and then have them put the money in a bank that has separate slots for each coin.
- For colors, take the kids to a fabric shop. Tell them the colors you are looking for, for a project, and have them go find what they like and talk about the colors and selection options.
Thanks for this informative blog, Stacey. I was wondering if you could comment on the issue of emotional/social readiness vs. academic readiness. My son, who will turn 5 at the end of June, had mastered all of the “7 things” before he turned 4. However, we’ve been advised to send him to transitional kindergarten (instead of kindergarten) this fall because his preschool teachers feel that he isn’t socially ready. He’s a very bright little boy academically, but he lacks independence (he doesn’t dress himself or pour his own juice, for example) and he has trouble consistently paying attention in preschool. (On the other hand, our 8-year-old daughter was very independent at age 4, but couldn’t write her name until she was 4-1/2.)
Anyhow, I was curious what you thought about this issue. It would be so much easier (and cheaper) for me if Jake went to kindergarten instead of TK next year! But I have great respect for his preschool teachers, too, and having experienced the incredibly high expectations in elementary school through my daughter, I want to do the right thing to bolster Jake’s long-term success. Your thoughts are welcomed!
Thanks!
Vicki
Thank you so much for asking this question, Vicki. I was just emailing back and forth with a friend who is in the same situation as this question comes up all the time.
Trust your gut on this one and let’s do what we can to help him practice his social skills so that by fall he is where he needs to be. Does he know any of the children that would be in his Kindergarten class? Can you contact the school and see if they would be willing to introduce you to some of the families that are active in your school and will be in his Kindergarten classroom? Do you belong to a playgroup or library program with families that will be in his Kindergarten? Join the PTA/PTO of your school to start buiding his social network. Do the work for him and put him in the situation to help his social skills grow.
My girls are both summer babies so I knew that they would be socially a bit behind the other kids in their enrollment. I was a summer baby and one of those kids that left for college orientation at age 17. I was the last person to get my driver’s license. So I knew what some of those challenges would be for my own girls and we elected to push them ahead rather than them becoming bored because they were not challenged in the classroom. That is the other side of the coin. If you don’t match his learning ability he might tune out!
There are some big differences with motor skills between a 4 year-old and a 5 year-old and you can even see it today with my 9 year old on the basketball court and she still believes in all the things that you want your kids to believe in, even if her older classmates do not.
So for both of my kids I built their social network so that they had a friend base that they felt comfortable with on that first day of school. Ironically it was my kids, who became the welcoming committee on that first day of school and sent me on my way with big tears in my eyes. It happened that way with both girls. So that’s your homework. Practice his social skills by putting him in situations where you can see him in action without any pressure in a fun environment. The easiest place to do this is at the playground. Does he make friends with kids who are playing there on his own? Can you introduce yourself to another parent and ask if the kids can play together in the sandbox? Give him the tools to practice making conversations with other kids. Get him to roll play, “Do you want to play in this sandbox with me?” or “Hey, let’s swing.” Many times just watching him, you will see if he already does this on his own or if he needs help to start the conversation and give him some time to practice, before you make your decision. Watching him will help you make up your mind!!
Please share with us, what you find!!!
Smiles - Stacey
Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply! I probably wasn’t clear - they aren’t as concerned about his ability to make friends and be involved with other kids - he’s really personable and makes friends easily. It’s the independence that I think they are most concerned about. And I can totally see that in him.
The issue of him potentially being bored in class would worry me more if I didn’t see the high level of work my second-grader is doing - and she’s not even at the top of her grade in terms of math or reading groups. I’m a “summer baby,” too, so I’ve been there myself and did just fine. But school is SO different now than it was 35 years ago when I was going into kindergarten!
I wish there were a clear-cut answer. For now, he’s registered for both kindergarten and TK. I’m leaning toward holding him back, but it’s not a full-bore lean (as you can probably tell).
Vicki: I am Stacey’s webmaster, and she knows about the issues my husband and I have had with educating our four children. She asked me to jump in, because we have a son who had the exact same issues you speak of.
Our son went to a Montessori preschool for a half-day, for 1 semester, when he was 3. We pulled him out the next term because they had no rule that a child needed to be potty-trained, but he came home one day with a bleeding bottom because no one changed him ALL DAY. The school was owned by a lady in our church, so they *knew* he wasn’t potty trained and they *knew* his supplies were in his backpack.
So, I got him Stacey’s books and I got him Boca Beth’s Spanish language program and I read up on preschooling my kids - and I just kept them at home and taught them myself!
We had put our oldest daughter into a private, non-parochial school (we lived in Utah at the time, out in the country and not part of the popular religion of the state) and sent our second daughter there, as well. Both had excellent experiences with their educations and we were not just pleased with the school (and still are, for what they did for our 2 daughters) - we were thrilled with their adaptability to our children’s needs.
Unfortunately, our son was a different matter. First, he WAS smart enough to start Kindergarten when he was 5 (May baby) - but, in that school, they K shared classes with the first grade - and his sister was in first grade, and I didn’t want him to have to endure her telling him what to do all the time (as older sisters do)…so, we held him back. Mind you, he, too, was not socially ready. And no matter how much we wanted him to be more sociable with little boys, he was the only boy his age in our church - and every darned time we went to a play place or library fun, he and his baby sister would come down with something (snotty noses, viruses, etc.) - and so I accept that part of the blame for in inability to be ready for K when he was 5 was because we’d pulled him out of school early and probably stunted his social skills. He, too, wasn’t big on being self-efficient — didn’t even finally potty train until he was 6!
Be that as it may, we packed him off to Kindergarten at 6 and hoped for the best. Which didn’t happen. He was in trouble the first week and by the end of the first semester, I was beyond frustrated and we yanked all three of the kids out of the school and homeschooled them. Oh, he was smart. He maxed out his class as far as reading (even beyond the first graders) and everything else. But, his play time was when he’d get into trouble. He’d take things that others were playing with, and smack them if he didn’t get his way. He didn’t like to be told to stop throwing balls in gym class, and when he started playing with a child, he didn’t want to stop. No matter how many times I told the principal (who was a dear, sweet lady) that he was bored, her response was always “what tells you that?”
After that homeschooling term, we moved back “home” to Texas, and enrolled the four kids in a Catholic school (though we’re Lutheran, we believed it to be better than the public schools where we live). It took a little longer for him to get into trouble, but he sure did! Same exact issues - stellar student, above and beyond everyone in his class, but socially inept. After a heated discussion with the principal - whereas she told us we were not qualified to homeschool our own son (ahem, my husband has a PhD in education - he was more qualified than SHE was) - we pulled him out of school in first grade, at about the 3rd quarter. Shortly thereafter, the school sent home his SAT (Stanford standardized test) scores - and my son had made a 99% overall grade. Boy, you can bet I fired off a heated letter to the principal and his teacher, telling them that I may be *just a mom*, but I was a mom who knew her children well, and knew that my son was so very bored with his classwork that he found trouble wherever he could. How did I know this? Let’s just say I was the class clown for 13 years of public school, and graduated 7th out of my class of 200 without doing an hour’s worth of homework a week EVER (and boy was I in for a shock when I hit college).
He’s now totally homeschooled by my husband, and he will remain here as long as we can keep him at home. I do believe in giving kids choices, but lucky for us, most of his Cub Scout pals are homeschooled, too - so, although he sometimes says he misses going to school, he’s just too smart for his grade level and not quite ready to have a handful of boys to mess around with during recess and PE. We know him well, and he not only does reading, writing, math, grammar, spelling, science and history everyday - he’s also learning Latin and Greek and taking guitar lessons. He will have a choice, as he matures, about going to school or not - but, for now, he’s in the best place he can be - and we’ve made some very serious mistakes that he will have to pay for his whole life (very low self-esteem because of the teachers “punishing” him for his errors). It’s on OUR shoulders, but we take our jobs very seriously and we work to give him the best education - and fun with other boys - that we can.
Hope this LONG diatribe helps you some in making your decision! We are raising a BOY. NOT a little girl. He won’t sit down and shut up just because the teacher says so. He will not be medicated just because the school wants him to calm down and not get excited about math and reading. He will be a little boy for as long as he needs to be - and then he’ll mature. At that time, we hope we’ll see that we’ve done our “job” and raised a fine, smart and socially adept young man.
This is such great information. I’m thinking about homeschooling and this will help me keep my little guy on track for what schools require. That way I know I’m teaching him the right stuff and so he won’t get behind.
Thanks so much for your wonderful blog. I’ll be back!!
Thanks Jessica!! And thanks for sharing Tammy and Vicki!