 While you may feel the pressure that today’s kindergarten lesson will make or break their first job interview, it’s important to remember that your kindergartener is still just a child. And your children need a healthy balance of academic rigor and play time. Here are some of the key elements to creating balance in your child’s kindergarten education. Foundational Academic Skills
Your child won’t be learning anything mind-blowing in their kindergarten year, but they will be learning important foundational skills upon which they will build the rest of their education. They’ll be learning how to identify letters in the alphabet and their sounds, and to put those sounds together into words. In the field of math, your kindergartener will learn basic addition and subtraction as well as using a calendar and telling time. A great kindergarten program has a strong academic program as it’s foundation. Healthy Play And Socializing While a lot is to be learned in the academic portion of a kindergarten classroom it cannot be ignored the importance of play. Through play, children learn social skills and develop the ability to work within a group. They learn about leadership, problem-solving, and collaboration not while sitting in a chair, but working with their hands and engaging with each other. Plus, children don’t have the ability to sit and listen to an hour-long lecture, so plenty of play time helps them to learn and grow all while getting the wiggles out. Personal Development Now, even though children may not innately sit quietly during a lesson in kindergarten this is a great opportunity to help them learn this skill which will become critical as they grow up. Often learning to focus is more difficult for little boys than it is for little girls, but all children and their families will have their own journey to figure it out. Part of the role of kindergarten is to give children the opportunity to develop some of these important developmental skills like paying attention and operating within a classroom system. None of these things is more important than the others, and in kindergarten education the goal is to strike a healthy balance. Kindergarten is an educational building block, but it’s also fun and engaging. If you’re getting ready to send a child off to kindergarten, contact us today. We’d love to give you a tour of campus and introduce you to some of our excellent educators. |