A Guide to Kindergarten
The first day a child attends kindergarten is the first time they become a pupil. It is the beginning of an exciting transition where learners blend play with reading and writing. Here, kindergarteners acquaint themselves with daily routines to become successful learners in the years to come.
What to expect a kindergarten child to achieve varies from facility to facility, but the bottom line remains, a child should transition from kindy knowing how to read and write. For more details about the curriculum, please consult with your child’s teacher about specific milestones your child must achieve before they climb up the ladder to higher classes.
If your child gets the right foundation at the kindy level, it is like laying a prime for your child to accomplish academic strides for the future. Liaise with the teachers on what extra books to buy for your child to boost their cognitive ability.
Kindergarten reading skills
Children grow as independent readers at the kindergarten level. As the child continues with daily schooling routines, they will become more comfortable reading. Your child is in kindergarten; every day is filled with activities like songs, class letters, poems, and more.
For your child to advance their reading skills, kindergarteners are expected to:
- Learn all letters, upper and lower, plus their sounds.
- Read books on their own, and memorize them.
- Read and listen to stories from their homes and events happening in their daily interactions.
- Know how to follow words from left-right, bottom-up, and page to page
- Recognize rhyming words
- Recognize basic sight words such as you, I, are, and others.
- Learn to construct one-syllable words to develop new sounds, i.e., replacing ‘C’ in Cat with ‘R’ for Rat.
Reading activities for kindergarteners
Children in kindergarten should learn to read and repeat their favorite books and memorize them. Let them associate pictures and clues while reading. Introduce your child to letters and let them learn alphabet books by taking pictures and objects that begin with the letters for each page. Give the child a chance to try filling blank spaces in words you find familiar and help them read the word to hint to them what is expected.
Writing skills for kindergarteners
As children develop and progress in their academics, they become young writers and even learn to use their newly-acquired spellings. They will write their short stories about what relates to their daily activities. They might spell some words incorrectly but don’t worry; it is the beginning of building blocks towards a deeper understanding. At the kindergarten stage, your toddler learns to spell and write the one-syllable word, for example, big, Cat, rag, bow, ran, run, and more.
After kindergarten level, your child should write the uppercase and lowercase letters, know how to write his or her name, write simple words when you dictate, write, and draw about various topics they have learned.
Writing activities for kindergarteners
Your child must be able to label objects within your home. Please encourage them to label objects at home, for example, books, toy bins, food, kitchen cutlery, clothes, and more. Apart from labeling objects, your kid should know how to draw pictures accordingly. Another fundamental writing activity for your child at home is to draw a picture and let them guess the spelling. Create a photo album and guide your child in labeling them.