10 Kindergarten Readiness Skills Your Child Needs

What do teachers really want your child to know on the first day of kindergarten ? Kindergarten is changing and parents are feeling pressure to prepare their children for this experience. 
Here are the 10 kindergarten readiness skills to focus on as you work on with your child. Don't be concerned if she/ he does not have them all down before the first day of kindergarten, as she/he will continue to work on them throughout the year. Try a few activities listed for the skills your child might need to work on a bit more.

1. Writing

• Help your child practice writing letters, especially the letters in his/her name.
• Write in shaving cream in the bathtub, salt or sugar in a cake pan or in finger paint to make practicing more fun and multisensory.

2. Letter Recognition

• Play games to help your child recognize some letters of the alphabet.

3. Beginning Sounds

• Make your child aware of the sound that each letter makes.
• Find items around the house that begin with the same sound and identify the letter that makes each sound.

4. Number Recognition and Counting

• Count throughout the day (for example, the crackers he/she is eating for snack).
• Point out numbers you see in your environment and have your child name them (for example, the numbers found on food boxes or street signs).

5. Shapes and Colors

• Help your child recognize more difficult shapes such as diamonds and rectangles by showing her how to draw them on paper and cut them out.
• Play games in which your child finds objects of particular colors and shapes around the house or in the neighborhood as you drive.

6. Fine Motor Skills

• Give your child several different writing options (colored pencils, crayons or markers) to help keep her interested in writing and drawing.
• Playing with play dough is a fun way to strengthen the muscles of the hand that will be used for writing.

7. Cutting

• Purchase a good pair of child-safe scissors and let your child practice.
• Give her old magazines or newspapers to cut up, or allow her to make a collage of the things she likes by cutting them from magazines and gluing them to a piece of paper.

8. Reading Readiness

• Run your finger under the words as you read to your child to help her learn that words go from left to right and top to bottom.
• Play games with rhyming words to help your child hear similar sounds in words. For example, as you are going up the stairs, name one word that rhymes with cat for each step as you go up.

9. Attention and Following Directions

• Give your child two and three step directions. For example: "put on your pajamas, brush your teeth and pick a book to read."
• Play Simon Says with two or three step directions. For example: "Simon Says jump up and down and shout hooray."

10. Social Skills

• Teach your child how to express her feelings if she doesn’t like something.

Site: Education.com