Preschool is changing and parents are feeling the pressure to prepare their kids for their first experience in school. As a parent, you want your child to be ready for kindergarten but not push them too hard. It helps to know a few preschool readiness activities to prepare your child for school.
Preschool Readiness Activities
In this post, we’ll discuss a few preschool readiness activities that will get your child ready for preschool. The article highlights basics such as writing and letter recognition to teaching your child how to express themselves and adjust to preschool so that your child can enjoy all of the long term benefits of preschool at the highest potential.
Writing
- Help your child practice writing letters. You can focus on the letters in his/her name.
- Consider teaching your child how to write his/her name with an uppercase first letter and the rest of the letters in lowercase.
- Try to make things a bit more fun by writing in finger paint or in salt or sugar in a cake pan.
Shapes and Colors
- Help your child to recognize shapes such as rectangles and diamonds by showing him/her how to draw then help them to cut them out.
- If your child is having a hard time recognizing colors, consider adding a little food coloring to vanilla pudding, milk or cookie dough to emphasize the colors.
- Incorporate games where your child finds objects of particular shapes or colors around the house or in the neighborhood.
Fine Motor Skills
- To help keep your child interested in drawing and writing, give him/her several different writing options (markers, crayons or colored pencils.)
- Having them play with dough is a fun way to strengthen the hand muscles that will be used for writing.
Letter Recognition
- Play a few games to help your child recognize letters of the alphabet as a beginner’s reading tip
- Refrigerator magnets can come in handy as you can use them to play hide and seek
- Use flashcards to play a game of alphabet go fish
Beginning Sounds
- Make your child aware of the sounds each letter makes
- Find items in the house that begin with the same sound and help them to identify the letter then makes each sound.
- Help your child to hear the individual sounds in words by overemphasizing the first sound
Number Recognition and Counting
- Have some fun counting (for example, the socks that you take out of the dryer or the number of stairs in your home).
- Point out any numbers you see around you and ask your child to name them (for example, the numbers found on street signs or cereal boxes)
Cutting
- Let your child practice cutting with a pair of child-safe scissors
- Give your child old newspapers or magazines to cut up. You can also allow him/her to make a collage by cutting the things he/she likes and gluing them to a piece of paper.
Bottom Line
There are many more preschool readiness activities you can do with your child every day. Make things fun and relaxing by including a lot of play activities. It’s also important to teach your child to express his/her feelings if she doesn’t like something. You can add all of these tips and tricks to your checklist of all of the things you should do before they go off to preschool.