Category Archives: Preschool / School

Is preschool necessary for all children?

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muddyhandsI’ve written several articles about how to choose a preschool.

But I want to address a more fundamental question: do all children need preschool? If so, how much preschool do they need? I know that some parents can feel a lot of pressure when the other parents in their social group are all talking preschool all the time…

I recently spoke with a mom who wasn’t feeling ready to send her just-barely-three-year-old child to school yet, but felt like she needed to put him in preschool so that he could learn what he was “supposed to learn”. This mom didn’t feel like she had enough to offer her child, and feared she wouldn’t “do it right.” When she asked her friends for recommendations, all the programs they recommended were 5 days a week, full day. She couldn’t imagine her child doing well with that much time away from her. She was struggling to decide what to so.

It’s important to realize that the learning needs of a preschool age child are really pretty simple and manageable for most adults to meet. Preschools don’t offer some magic formula for future success that the average parent can’t duplicate at home.

Studies show that for children from impoverished backgrounds, whose family members have less than high school educations, there is a very clear benefit to attending preschool in terms of basic skill development. (Learn more: http://tinyurl.com/bez9qra or read any of the many articles that address the research-proven benefits of Early Head Start.)

However, middle class children of educated parents will typically receive in their home environment the stimulation and guidance they need in order to be ready for kindergarten when the time comes, making preschool more optional.

Parents can ensure school readiness by paying attention to the essential skills listed in my last post and helping their children build them. Thinking of everyday life as a learning opportunity helps you to keep an easy focus on skill-building.

Many of these skills can easily be learned from family members at home – set up a craft zone to practice with all the school supplies, read books together, practice independence in dressing, feeding, and so on.

Other skills can be built by family trips out in the community – there’s a lot of math to be learned by watching you cook, lots of science to learn in a trip to the pet store to pick up dog food, tons of vocabulary in every trip to any store, and lessons in patience and self-control at the sushi-go-round.

Social skills and conflict resolution get put into practice during a trip to the park or an indoor playground and sitting down in a group and paying attention to an adult is the heart and soul of library story time.

There are two elements that are easily found in preschool that parents who choose not to do preschool may need to seek out options for:

  1. Times when your child is cared for and must obey an adult other than a family member. This doesn’t have to be a preschool teacher. It could be a babysitter, or a Sunday school teacher, or gymnastics coach, or almost any other caring authority figure.
  2. A stable group of children to play with many times over a long period of time. Most drop-in community programs won’t have consistent kids each week. So you may want to seek out a more intentional community of playmates: maybe neighbor kids if you’re lucky, or cousins, or kids at church, or Daisy scouts, or…

So, if you think your child is ready for preschool and would enjoy it and benefit from it, great! If you’re ready to send your little one off to preschool, great! Here’s information about how to choose the preschool that is the best possible fit for you and your child.

And you could still do all the things I describe above to support your child’s learning and they’ll benefit from that as well.

But, if you’re not ready to send your child to preschool, or you feel your child is not ready, hopefully this post relieves a little of the pressure you might be feeling about “needing” to put your child in preschool. Having more time with you, as their own personal, loving, one-on-one coach in life skills could be exactly what you both need for now.

Here are a couple blog posts where moms share their thoughts about why they’re not choosing preschool: http://playborhood.com/2011/01/is_preschool_important_for_all_kids/ and Is Preschool Necessary
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Essential skills for the preschool years

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drawThere are several important kindergarten-readiness skills for children to work on during the preschool years (age 3 and 4) which lay the foundation for success in the early years of school. If you are choosing a preschool for your child, you will want to ensure that they are working on all these areas. If you are choosing not to do formal preschool, keep these skills in mind as you plan your activities and move through your days with your child, so that they will accomplish them by age 5.

  • Independence: Children learn to toilet, dress themselves, feed themselves, and clean up their toys. It often feels easier and more efficient for parents (or preschool teachers) to do these things for a child, but children only learn by doing things for themselves. (With gentle correction of their mistakes when needed.)
  • Patience and Self-Regulation: Children learn to wait, take turns, share, stand in line, not interrupt, work to solve a problem on their own without always asking for help, and so on. Children in a group preschool setting simply have to do this. At home, parents may want to remind themselves to not always jump to meet a child’s needs immediately, but instead work on delayed gratification for the child. (Ask them to wait a few minutes for something. Require that they calm down and ask for something politely before giving it to them.
  • Emotional stability: Children learn to control their temper, calm themselves down when upset, and move forward when they’re sad.
  • Social Skills – Making Friends and Conflict Resolution: These are best practiced in unstructured playtime with other kids that’s not guided by adults, such as play-dates and playground time. Having consistent playmates over a long period of time helps to build these skills at a deeper level, so look for opportunities such as preschool, neighbor kids, church members, cousins, etc.
  • Group Participation: Children learn to sit quietly for 10 – 15 minutes at a time, learn to pay attention to someone else speaking or reading a story, and learn to join in group activities like songs. Most preschools offer one or two “circle” times per class to work on this; parents can also look for story times at their library.
  • Listens to and relates to non-family-member adult: To succeed in school, a child needs to be able to separate from his or her parent, to listen to and obey the instructions of another adult, and get support from another adult.
    • Can answer simple questions about events or his/her environment
    • Can follow 2 step directions. (Do this, then that.)
  • Academic Foundations. The following is a sample list of basic skills for children to gain, all of which can be taught gradually in a relaxed, playful manner.
    • Can say the letters of the alphabet, recognize them in writing, maybe write a few.
    • Can say numbers 1 – 20 in order, can recognize written numbers, count 10 objects.
    • Can draw a picture to express what he is thinking about / talking about.
    • Knows basic ideas like colors, shapes, days of the week, seasons, and opposites.
    • Can manage basic school supplies: crayons, pencil, scissors, glue, tape, blocks.
    • Has basic computer / technology skills: can use a mouse and a touchscreen.

Note: all those categories are equally important… in many ways patience and self-regulation is much more important than the academic skills… If a kindergarten child knows how to sit still and listen, learning the alphabet is easy. If they can’t sit still, then learning much else will be hard!

Should your preschooler learn to read?

Parents can offer an environment that encourages literacy and basic math knowledge by simple things like: reading lots of books together, counting stairs, pointing out words on signs, singing songs and keeping the beat. If your child is passionate about letters and numbers very early, it’s fine to encourage that through more reading, math play, interaction, etc. Some children naturally learn to read or do math quite young.

However, it’s not essential that they do so! Although it is possible to use flashcards, worksheets and apps to teach children to read and/or do math at a very young age, there’s no need to do so. Although those children would enter kindergarten ahead of the other kids, the benefits all even out by midway through elementary school. And studies have found that the kids who were drilled early tended to have more anxiety about academics later on than those who were gently encouraged. (Learn more: http://trevorcairney.blogspot.com/2009/02/your-baby-can-read-part-2.html and http://www.todaysparent.com/family/parenting/earlier-faster-better-precocious-kids/_

Local resource:

If you live in Bellevue, WA, the Bellevue School District has a really nice overview of kindergarten readiness, how to prepare your child for starting school and what to expect: https://bsd405.org/wp-content/pdf/kindergarten/welcome-to-kindergarten.pdf 

photo credit: clappstar via photopin cc