True North: A family magazine for Bend and Central Oregon.

Preparing Your Child for Kindergarten: One Teacher's Insight and Advice
By Emily Edelman

For most parents, guarding the physical safety of their children comes naturally. Cutting bananas into small pieces, moving obstacles out of a walking toddler's way, and double-checking the car seat harness before driving are just a couple of things they automatically do to ensure their child's safety.

As children grow however, the dangers parents wish to protect them from become more complex. Entering school as a kindergartner is one of the first events for both children and parents that involves more than just physical safety. Because a child's first experiences with education will affect their self-esteem and ability to learn throughout their school years, many parents fret over how to protect them from feeling uncomfortable and unhappy at school.

Preparing children for kindergarten does not come as naturally to most parents as double checking on a car seat harness. Because it requires more study and planning parents often react in one of two unhelpful ways: they make learning distasteful to by obsessing over flashcards and kindergarten homework, or they disadvantage their children by doing nothing to prepare them at all.

Fortunately, Virginia Nelson, a teacher at Ensworth Elementary who has taught kindergarten in Bend for eight years, offers parents insight into ideally what a child entering her class will know and be able to do as well as how parents can help prepare them.

While Virginia supports parents working with their children on the basics: numbers, colors, letters, she believes that subversive teaching (getting children to learn without realizing it) is the most effective and enjoyable way to go about preparing children for the kindergarten experience. The following are the benchmarks of readiness or ideals for children entering kindergarten, and Virginia's suggestions on how parents can use subversive teaching techniques to help their children reach them:

1. Familiarity with literature: For Virginia, this means being able to "interact with print" which includes recognizing the front of a book and using the cover to predict the topic of the story. It also means the child expects a title page and beginning, middle, and end, to a story. And, preferably, they will be able to study the illustrations in the book as a way of understanding the story. Virginia does not recommend forcing reading time or making a toddler finish a board book in order to meet this goal. Not all children naturally enjoy being read to and looking at books.

The following are subversive teaching techniques that can familiarize a child who does not enjoy books with studying and handling some form of print:

Spread out the ads from a grocery store and let the child circle five items she wants to get. The parent can also circle five items and then the pair can narrow the ten down to two.
Pick up a magazine and pull your child into your lap. Together, look at pictures as long as the child is willing.

2. Social exposure and skills: This includes having the ability to listen to others, interacting in a group, and practicing cooperation. Interestingly enough, some of the things we assume are a great social preparation for our children are not. Virginia explains, "Parents say, ‘Kindergarten is going to be so easy because my child has been in daycare and a really good preschool three days a week.' Often that child, by the third week of kindergarten wants to quit, because there are twenty children and one adult."

Virginia points out that kindergarten is an entirely new situation. All the children are five and not a mix of two through six year olds. Even a child who has been in a large Sunday school class has not encountered a situation involving nineteen other children needing attention and direction from just one adult. The newness of the situation, from being responsible for hanging up a coat to calling the adult "Mrs. Nelson," is exhausting for children. While parents may not be able to fully prepare their children for the group experience of kindergarten, they can do a lot to reduce other stresses their children will face.

Virginia recommends the following for both preparing a child to be part of a large group and reducing the stress that comes along with the newness of the kindergarten setting:

"Be really patient, Mom and Dad," she says. "You can talk about it and warn your child, but they won't understand. They have no experience from which to base it." She asks parents to stay open-minded about how their children are adapting for the first six weeks of kindergarten.
Don't send your children to school wearing outfits with belts, regardless of how cute they are, for at least the first six weeks of school. She explains that a belt adds a lot of difficulty to the already stressful situation of using the bathroom alone.
Make sure your children know how to zip their clothes. Having the ability to zip can be a big boost for a child in an unfamiliar situation. A child who zips becomes a great help to the teacher. Parents should know that this one small skill guarantees a positive school experience.
Buy the right shoes! Knowing how to tie is a similar skill to zipping. However, Virginia points out that tying is a multi-step process children grasp at different ages. She recommends that parents be patient, allowing their children to learn to tie as they are ready. Meanwhile, she says, "Buy shoes with Velcro."
Get your children to school on time. Virginia told the story of a little girl who in the first forty days of kindergarten had been late for thirty. Her tardiness was a big disadvantage to herself. During the first fifteen minutes of kindergarten this little girl missed, the students had sat in a circle learning names and pairing up for the day's activities. Being late kept her from getting to know her classmates and making friends. "It's really hard to come into a room where everyone is prepared and you are not. It makes for a rough start," Virginia says.

3. The ability to retell a story or event: Describing something that has just happened requires sequencing or putting events into the appropriate order. This is a skill that is learned. Sequencing is important for being a reader and understanding the progression of a story. Virginia explains that math problems also have a progression of steps that must come in the appropriate order.

She suggests teaching this skill subversively by simply making it part of conversation. A parent can say, "Tell Daddy what we saw on our way home from the store!" While listening, the parent can encourage appropriate sequencing by asking, "What came next?"

4. Knowing numbers, colors, and recognizing one's own name: Preferably, Virginia says, a child entering kindergarten will know how to count to twenty-five. However, parents should understand that counting to twenty-five is different from recognizing the numbers one through twenty-five and is different from knowing the spatial value of one item versus twenty-five items. When children learn to count to twenty-five, or even ten, they are memorizing items in a list. In Virginia's kindergarten class, children spend a lot of time expanding their understanding of numbers.

The following are tips for parents who want to teach children both the ability to count and also the spatial value of numbers:

From the time your child first begins to walk, count their steps.
As a child grows, parents can encourage learning numbers by asking children to put four forks on the table, or three ice cubes in a glass.

In reference to colors, Virginia cautioned that some are more difficult for children to differentiate from one another, such as black and brown. She recommends working on color recognition in the following way:

Ask your children, "How many red cars do you see?" or "What color was the hat on that snowman?"

The ability to write one's name is a great skill for children to learn, however, Virginia instructs parents to remember capital and lower case letters. She says it's common for her students to start school writing their names in all capital letters. Getting them to start with a capital letter and then switch to lower case letters is, "a big challenge," she says. She also reminds parents to teach their children to form letters from the top down, a skill needed for cursive writing. As a teacher, Virginia would personally prefer a child to start school not writing his name at all over writing it in all caps, forming letters bottom to top.

5. Having an attitude of adventure about school and learning: "You have to work to be a learner," Virginia says. "You have to practice and you have to try." Virginia feels that an ill-formed attitude toward learning largely comes from two things: fear of making mistakes and lack of interaction with parents. To address the first part of this problem, Virginia enthusiastically points out her failures to her class. "Oh, silly me!" she says. Eventually, she will see her students doing the same. "Failure is part of learning," she explains. Virginia encourages parents to not only point out their mistakes, but also to be honest with their children about any challenges with learning they may have faced in school.

The second part of the problem is one that parents need to fix. She says parents forget to talk to their children. There is a difference between saying, "Are you ready for your bath?" and "Does that boy have on the same jacket as you?" The first question is so routine it has stopped requiring an original thought process. The second asks the child to notice and decide something.

According to Virginia we need to be reminded that talking to our children in a way that requires them to notice and process information for themselves helps them become a good learner. "Their world is small," Virginia says. "They don't know what to notice. You need to expand it."

Rather than feeling anxious about how to prepare children for kindergarten, parents should know that they are capable of teaching them the skills they need. Undoubtedly, there will still be the anticipation of the pitfalls our children may face, things they know nothing about. Hopefully, though, if we follow some of Virginia's advice then we will be able to spend more time helping our children with their fears about kindergarten and less on our own.

Emily Edelman is a stay-at-home mom to a one year old little boy. She and her husband love living in Redmond. She enjoys everything about Central Oregon except the high pollen count in spring.