 You send your children off to their first year of kindergarten with a lot of hopes and dreams for where high-quality education will take them. It's hard to imagine at that age what kind of careers and hobbies they will eventually have, but you have the sense that this is the first in a lot of exciting big steps for your child’s education. But, it’s easy for parents to discount the importance of kindergarten. While it may look like they’re learning simple skills, so far from the more complex lessons to come, the classroom exercises they begin mastering in kindergarten are the building blocks for the rest of their academic lives. Builds A Strong Foundation
Just like the house you live in and the building where you drop your kids off to school in the morning, your child needs a strong foundation. Kids grow up fast, and the expectations put on them at school come fast as well. Children who don’t grasp this year's lessons may fall behind and be unprepared for the years to come. Also, research shows that children who learned more in kindergarten were more likely to attend college, and more likely to have higher earning potential when they get older. You may find it hard to believe that learning to write the alphabet or any of the other skills developed during kindergarten could make or break their educational future, but we see evidence of this time and time again. It Goes Beyond Academics And while we know that kindergarteners begin to accumulate the academic building blocks they need for the future, we also know that there is so much more value to kindergarten than that. Research also shows that kids who have the highest social and emotional skills in kindergarten are more likely to succeed later on in life. And, unlike intellect, social skills can be taught. So if your kindergarten child is struggling socially, that doesn't mean he or she is absolutely destined to underachieve in the future. We encourage you to work with your children to help them develop socially and academically so that they can get the most out of their kindergarten education. Do you have a child in kindergarten this year? Perhaps you still have a couple of years to prepare for this big move? Either way, we want you to know how valuable a kindergarten education is to your child. At St. Barnabas we invest in kindergarten because we know its the building block for the years to come. For more information about our commitment to high-quality kindergarten programming, contact us today. |