7 tips to prepare your child for kindergarten

[AD] When your child’s starting kindergarten, it’s natural to experience a range of emotions. You’ll be proud of them, but you may also get emotional about how much they’re growing up.

As a mum you want your child to do well in kindergarten, you don’t want any struggles you, or they are having with adjusting to this next stage of life to affect their kindergarten experience.

Here are 7 tips that will prepare your child for kindergarten to ensure that the process goes smoothly.

Practice social skills

Kindergarten isn’t just a place for learning, it’s also a place where your child will need to have some social skills to make friends.

Your child doesn’t have to master being sociable, they only need to know the basics, like how to behave around other children.

You can practice this by surrounding them with other kids their age early on, such as siblings or cousins, which is a great way to practice and build their social skills.

Play games with directions

Once your child starts kindergarten, they’ll be expected to follow their teachers’ directions, which can be hard for some children, and could lead to issues in kindergarten and even school later on.

To help your child with this, you can make following directions fun, by playing games that involve listening and taking directions, which gets your child to learn how to follow directions without even realising it.

Start counting with them

Your child will be expected to learn quite a few things when they start kindergarten, which can make them feel overwhelmed.

To avoid feelings of overwhelm, it’s worth helping them with certain things ahead of time, such as counting.

Getting your child to count objects around the home, or when you’re out, before starting kindergarten, will help them feel less overwhelmed when they start, and will give them a head start when they start school.

Get them reading

Reading is another thing you can give your child a head start with, which they’ll start perfecting more at school.

There are many resources that help kids learn to read for kindergarten, which could be worth looking into, as they’ll help your child adjust better once they start kindergarten.

Discover shapes and colours

Shapes and colours are another thing your child will learn in kindergarten, and will be incorporated into your child’s day a lot.

If your child has a basic knowledge of shapes and colours before starting kindergarten, they’ll carry their love of this knowledge into their kindergarten days.

You don’t need to spend a lot of time teaching your children shapes and colours, games like I Spy, and spending quality time with your kids playing other shape and colour related games, can help them to learn shapes and colours in no time.

Create a routine

Your child may end up struggling in kindergarten if they’re not used to having a routine, which could even lead to them getting emotional or acting out.

You can avoid this by creating a routine for them as early as possible.

Try to make this as similar to the kindergarten routine as possible, such as having lunch at the time kindergarten has it, and spending time reading with them throughout the day.

Ease into school separations

One of the more difficult parts of children starting kindergarten is separation, it may be a new experience for you and your child, even if you’ll just be separated for a few hours.

One way that you can ease into school separations is to let family members spend a few hours with your child without you, which will make school separations a lot easier.

Tips to prepare your child for kindergarten – a recap

There’s plenty of times in your child’s life when you’ll feel emotional, one of these is when they start kindergarten.

Starting kindergarten will be an adjustment for you and your child, but there are some things you can do to prepare your child for kindergarten to make the transition easier, which includes:

• Practicing social skills so they can make friends
• Playing games that teach them directions, so they get used to listening to a teacher
• Starting to count, read, and learn shapes and colours with them so they don’t feel overwhelmed when they start learning about them at kindergarten
• Creating a routine that’s similar to kindergarten
• Easing into separating from them by getting them to spend time away from you

What tips do you have for preparing your child for kindergarten?