How to Get Your Child Ready to Start School

Many parents, especially with their first child, are reluctant to start educating their child until their child starts school. This is because they do not feel they have the expertise or are scared that what they do may conflict with what is taught at school.

Little do they realise that the school is relying on the parents to have taught their child quite a number of skills before sending their child to school.

This does not mean that as a parent you should have taught your child to read before getting to school, although that is not a bad thing if you know what you are doing – but certainly you should have made a start teaching pre-reading skills so that your child will be ready to learn more formally when she/he reaches school.

Getting Your Child Ready to Learn

Learning is a social activity requiring meaningful interaction between people – and this requires good communication skills – especially listening, talking and comprehension skills.

Build good comprehension and communication skills requires you to spend a lot of active time with your young child – putting in the time in the first five years will help your child learn how to become independent of you. Failure to set aside regular time to do simple activities, games, craft, singing and so on, will cost you dearly later on as your child will not be ready or able to learn quickly at school.

Skills to develop in the first five years include skills like these:

Good speech skills
No baby talk
Proper use of pronouns (Say, ‘I want you to …’ rather than, ‘Mummy wants Robbie to …’)
Able to follow instructions. First just one instruction at a time, then try two instructions like, ‘Put your pyjamas on then clean your teeth.’
Prepared to follow instructions that you give (Don’t make requests like, ‘Will you please clean your teeth now Rob.’ as you are not really saying what you mean. Instead give clear instructions like, ‘Go and clean you teeth now Rob.’
Gradually develop longer and longer conversations with your child. This is much easier if you are sharing an activity together like reading a book, preparing food together, going shopping and so on.
Help your child master speaking in sentences – do this gradually.
Develop fine motor skills by doing craft work with modelling clay, folding and cutting paper, drawing with pencils and so on.
Develop gross motor coordination skills and build core strength by walking, going to the park, throwing and kicking balls and so on.
Logic skills can be developed with games and learning to count. Simple board games teach a lot of skills at the same time, including emotional and social skills.
Emotional resilience is a critical skill to develop before your child reaches school otherwise she/he will have a lot of difficulty adjusting to the school environment. Your child needs experience being looked after by other people, and good communication skills like all those listed above.

What About Technology?

Watching TV and DVDs, or playing games on computers and mobile phones need to be kept to a minimum not just with very young children, but right through school. Just being good at using your thumbs, or being able to recite a video word-for-word after watching it many times are not useful skills at school and beyond if they are at the expense of a more well-rounded education.

Too many parents use technology as a babysitting device so they can get on with their busy lives – or so they can have a rest from their busy lives. I understand completely how you feel but the little benefit you get in the short term will be more than negated by the pain you will experience later on. Remember that children are social beings who crave interaction – if you don’t give them lots of chances for positive interaction then they will get your attention eventually by using negative behaviour. Once they get into the habit of controlling you through negative behaviour you will find it very difficult to break out of the negative cycle.

My recommendation is no more than 30 minutes of technology per day, or 3-4 hours a week total! Don’t say I didn’t warn you if you go over that amount. Everything in moderation.

What About You?

Having a child will be a very rewarding experience if you feel that you have been successful at building an independent person. If your child does not manage to do well at school and other activities, both you and your child will be under a lot of stress and your lives will not be enjoyable.

Life is complicated and challenging without children, but it is ten times more challenging and complicated with them. If you have children then I’m sure you would agree.

This means that you need to learn a lot of skills and strategies to be able to manage all your responsibilities to your child, your relationship, AND, to yourself. The best parents are not the parents that worry a lot about their child, but those who are a good role model, those who demonstrate good coping skills and those who are independent enough to have a bit of life for themselves that does not involve family – that just might mean going to the gym every afternoon, or to a book club once a month, or doing voluntary work once a week, whatever you want.

Make Parenting a Win-Win Situation for You and Your Child

A positive mind set will go a long way to making your job as a parent easier. Do things that will kill two birds with the one stone.

For example, rather than plonking your child in front of a DVD while you cook dinner, keep your child in the kitchen with you and give him/her jobs or activities to do. Teach simple cooking tasks, sing simple songs while you work, listen to recordings of stories or tell stories yourself, get all the saucepans out and let your child play with them.

There is lot’s more I could say on the issue of making sure you look after yourself but I will save it for another article.

Just remember – if you are not in good shape, you will not be in a good position to help your child.

Chris Brooks
Principal
High Performance Learning

I welcome your comments. You can add them below.

Getting Help or Helping Others

If you have any comments or questions, leave them below and I will try and answer them. If you have been there and done that as far as parenting is concerned, leave some of your pearls of wisdom for the rest of us.

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Comments

ground says

November 8, 2011 at 10:33 am

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