When to start your child in preschool
How to Prepare Your Child for the Preschool Curriculum | Parents
When people ask me how they can prepare their child for preschool, I always tell them you
have to remember three key things. Talk to them, read to them, and let them play. So,
what does that mean? So, you should always talk to your child. Have conversation about
anything that you can think of. Ask them questions. Wait for them to answer. Point out things
that you see in your daily life, and ask them what they think. This builds their vocabulary.
It teaches them to have a conversation, and to listen, and wait their turn. Always read
to your children. You should give children opportunities to explore books, to read books
with you, to listen to you read, and to just sit and have time to flip through them, and
learn what a book looks like. Before children go to bed, is nice time to read them a story,
and then to have them help you to read a book, by looking at the pictures, listening to your
words, and repeating it back. Giving children shared book experiences at home, sets them
up for preschool, where the children are read to on a daily basis. They're read to in large
group, there's typically a center that they can read books on their own, and then they
can sit with the teacher and have a one-on-one book experience. So, with the reading and
the talking, the last thing you should always let children do, is play, and you wanna give
children lots of opportunities to play with other children, in any type of social setting,
before you go to preschool. You can take them to the park, you can take them to play areas,
you can have playdates at home. This gives them a chance to play with materials with
somebody else. To interact with them, to have conversations with them, to watch another
child play, and see if maybe that's something they can do as well. These beginning social
experiences, will set them up nicely for when they walk to a preschool classroom, and are
given the opportunity to talk to 15 of their peers, and choose who they wanna play with,
and where they wanna play. So the key is really to give them the life experiences. To give
them lots of books, talk to them a lot, let them play, and when they walk into a preschool
classroom, they'll be ready to go.
