Get Ready With Me for Kindergarten

Tips & Tricks for Home

Learning through play is natural for children. Playtime with your child can be a relaxing time for both of you, full of fun and curiosity. Learning can be the same! When you teach through play, there are no lesson plans or tests. Enjoy the time you spend together. When you are smiling and having fun, your child will never know you are “teaching” anything.

Dressing Skills

In kindergarten, your child will need to change shoes and prepare for outdoor play a few times a day. These activities may help build their skills and confidence to do these tasks more independently.

• If you have time when getting ready in the morning, lay your child’s shoes and hat out in a way that might encourage them to try putting them on by themselves. If time runs out, no problem! It’s okay to help them.
• Label children’s belongings with their name or a visual to help them identify their items.
• Encourage your child to choose their clothing and dress themselves. When children are offered a choice, they feel empowered!
• Provide opportunities and materials for your child to play dress up, allowing them to practice dressing skills through play.
• When making supper, encourage your child to try doing their zippers, snaps, or other fasteners or practice putting on their own socks. 
• Encourage your child to ask for help when they experience any difficulty. 

Lunch time skills

Your child will have the opportunity for a few nutrition breaks during their school day. Mealtimes can be a great opportunity to connect with peers, but also requires some skills to make sure those little bodies get fueled up!

• Have a “kindergarten lunch” at home! Use the containers that you might use in their lunch box during the school year and fill them with some fun summer snacks that they would be eating anyway. Let them try opening and closing the containers on their own.
• Play a sorting game to support your child to identify which items go in waste, compost and recycling.
• Turn on some fun music and prepare lunch together the evening before school. This will allow adequate time for your child to select their lunch items and prepare them themselves ( for example: bag carrots, butter crackers, choose banana or an apple).
• Discuss school mealtimes with your child before they head to school; for example, which foods are for snack time and which foods are for lunch.
• Practice how to safely use scissors to open wrappers by using playdoh to cut and manipulate.
• If possible, include your child in choosing a lunch can and water bottle this will help them identify their own bottle.
• Practice Model talking about food (especially foods that may be new to them) in a positive way.  Talk about tastes and textures and similarities between snacks you are eating with them (e.g. “I have some crunchy carrots!  They are bright orange and sweet!  Oh look – we both have some yummy, crunchy, salty pretzels!”)

ABCs, 123s and More

Kindergarten lays the foundation for a rich school journey through literacy and learning. The following are some ways to help your child notice and embrace these early concepts.

• When taking your kids to their favorite ice cream shop, point out your child’s first initial on the menu board (e.g. “Look! It’s your letter, M!”)
• Show your child how to count out the shells you find on the beach. Try pausing to give them a chance to fill in a number! (e.g. “Ooh, you found one, two, three, …..”)
• Have fun with patterns. For example, while putting away toys, say, “look! I found a pattern! Car, truck, car, truck, car, truck!”
• Take a nature walk in the park or in your backyard and have your child collect natural items, such as leaves, rocks, and sticks. This is a great way to encourage observation and exploration skills (e.g. “feel how smooth this rock is”; “how are these leaves different”; “I wonder if this (item) sinks or floats”)
• Read to your child frequently to foster a love of reading. Make the story time interactive by using puppets and asking questions related to the story and pictures on the page. For example, “what do you think will happen next?”
• Play “I Spy with my Little Eye” using environmental print (letters and numbers), for example, signage at the grocery store or on the street.
• Give your child their own grocery list to encourage their help and independence with grocery shopping.  Encourage them to check off or cross out their items when found.
• Access your local library to discover various programs and activities offered to support your child’s interactions with other community members and children their own age.
• Sing rhyming songs or play rhyming games with your child (e.g. Down by the bay, What rhymes with Hat?.....-Mat, Tree-Bee, etc.)
• Play matching games or make your own cards to encourage matching.  Try colors (written word and color swatch), Upper case and lower case letters, written number and symbol or dots for counting, etc.
• Play a freeze game using opposite directions- jump high, crawl low; move fast, move slow; stand tall, curl up small. Model these in day to day experiences (turning on and off the tap/light switch, open and close the door/window, stand up, sit down, etc.)
• Encourage your child to set and help clear the table.  This supports one-to-one correspondence.
• Use car drives to sing the alphabet songs, play eye spy games, or count how many “red cars” you see.
• Add counting and sorting experiences into daily routines.  Sort various trail mix snacks.  Count out the raisins; which pile has more or less?  If I take two away, how many do I have left?  This introduces simple math concepts in a fun and creative way.

Social-Emotional Learning

Feelings can be overwhelming, especially for preschoolers! These activities may help your child begin to learn to recognize and handle their many wonderful emotions.

• Model how you might recognize your own feelings in an upsetting situation (e.g. “oh no… I just dropped my ice cream! That makes me feel sad! I think I need to take a few deep breaths.”)
• Acknowledge and label your child’s emotions as you observe the emotions happening. Recognize that your child’s emotions are valid. For example, “I see that you are disappointed that we can’t go to the park now, but we will go when the rain stops.”
• Explore the internet for self-regulation strategies that your child is comfortable implementing at school and model them at home. Examples include Five-Finger breathing, 5-4-3-2-1 grounding, visualizations, calm space, fidget toys, and so many more!
• Read books about children going on an adventure or starting school, such as the Kissing Hand, to prepare them for attending school independently.
• Set up a calm down space in your home with your child that includes some of their comfort items (e.g. favourite stuffed animal, cozy blankets and pillows). Use language like, “I see that you are feeling angry, do you want to go to your calm down space with me?”. Eventually, they might ask to go there on their own when they recognize that it is what they need.
• Model using empathetic statements with your child when they encounter difficult or frustrating situations (e.g. “Oh no!  Your block tower fell over!  You worked so hard on that.  That would make me sad too!). 

Fine Motor Skills

Activities that exercise the small muscles in children’s hands can eventually help them open their lunch box containers, use scissors, hold pencils, and do many other daily kindergarten tasks! Here are a few you can try:

• Play with playdough – encourage your child to squeeze, pull, and rip playdough apart
• Art/mark making using pencils, chalk, markers, pastels and paintbrushes.
• Stringing beads or cheerios onto a lace.
• Picking up objects with clothespins, tongs and tweezers.
• Blowing and popping bubbles
• Sand or water play with cups, spoons and bowls.
• Building with blocks or LEGOS
• Using clothespins to hold different objects (e.g., leaves, flowers, or strings etc.) to make a cool art from your home or yard. Then label them to make different brush strokes (e.g., feather, grass, hedge etc.). You could even glue them on a cardboard and frame them.

Gross Motor Skills

Between phys ed class and recess, your child will have lots of chances to participate in big-body movement at school! These activities can help exercise those big muscles prior to kindergarten.

• Play games outdoors with your child.  Throw and catch a ball, hop on two feet, create an obstacle course.  A variety of different movements will help your child strengthen their large muscle movements.
• Play Red Light, Green Light, mother may I, Red Rover, or chase games to get children moving at various speeds.
• Take your child on trips to their school playground – practice climbing, sliding, running through obstacles in this environment
• Set up an obstacle course outside or inside (if you have space to do so safely). It can be as simple as saying, “let me see you run to the tree, jump 3 times, and come back to the house” and show them how to do it to join in the fun.
• Practice jumping with one foot and two. Have your child jump over cracks in the road or sidewalk with you, hop like bunnies on both feet, and hop on one foot.

Routines

Your child may feel more secure and comfortable with a consistent daily routine. The following are ways to practice routine-following skills and prepare your child for the daily routines of kindergarteners. Practicing can take a lot of time, practicing on the weekend could relive the urgency of keeping to a schedule.

• Practice morning routines for getting dressed, brushing hair, brushing teeth and eating breakfast by a certain time to leave the home.
• Use a visual schedule so that your child can follow along with the daily routine and can see what’s coming next.
• Practice packing lunches and packing school bags so children know what to take to school.
• Use timers on phones or other devices to practice getting ready to go for the day so when school starts children are used to the morning routine.
• Practice nighttime routines, getting a good sleep, being prepared for the next day.
• Drive, walk or bike the route to school so children are familiar with the scenery and stops and so they are prepared for the length of the daily journey.
• Take the local transit bus to practice walking up and down the stairs and support your child to gain comfort in travelling on the bus.  Discuss bus safety during these trips.
• If your child finds it hard sometimes when asked to do something right away, practice asking for “more time” before transitioning to the next activity. 
• If your child finds some routines too difficult to do on their own yet, practice asking for help from adults.
• Go to the school playground to play on the equipment and talk about the boundaries while you’re there (staying within a specified area).

Social Friendship Skills

Kindergarten provides opportunities for lots of new friendships and social situations. You can help your child learn how to interact with others in a positive way through some of these activities.

• Play games with your child, encourage turn taking and waiting their turn.  It’s okay for your child to not always win in these games, as handling disappointment is also an important lesson.
• Notice and praise your child when they share something with someone else.  Praising this behavior will encourage your child to repeat this in the future.
• Try to figure out some outdoor games your children may love to play (e.g. tag, hide and seek, follow the leader, races – anything they like).  Model different ways to invite others to play their preferred games, and practice inviting your child to play games you like. 
• Sometimes, it's hard for some children to wait for a turn with something they really like.  Try coaching them through ways to make waiting a little easier (e.g. teach them to look for other fun things to do, teach them to ask a friend/adult to tell them when they are finished playing with something they want to play with). 
• Sometimes children need space from peers or would prefer to play alone.  Talk to your child about nice ways to advocate for their needs socially (e.g. “I need space please”). 
• Play your child’s preferred game for a bit, then have them play an activity/game you want for a short time before giving them the option to switch back to their game/activity (to help increase flexibility in playing with others).
• Decide on an activity together, collaborating on the details or rules together.