Ways to help prepare your child for school
Talk to your child encourage them to talk, tell and ask them the names of things of things in the house (name all things you would find in a bedroom, name all things on the kitchen table) name things you would find in the town, when you are out shopping, names of fruit or vegetables, discuss pictures etc.
Listen to your child, give them time to explain and retell events to you. Avoid interrupting, even if you know what they are going to say, When talking to your child avoid using baby talk.
Read to your child everyday. This will encourage a love of books, bedtime is a very appropriate time to do this. The childís main interest will be in the pictures so allow time to examine and comment on the pictures. Encourage them to repeat what happened in the story and to talk about their favourite bit
Recite nursery rhymes on a daily basis
Young children need to develop the muscles in their hands before they can write properly this can be done by encouring them to do things such as cutting, drawing (use crayons, twistables, pencils etc), or using play dough or hard marla, painting, zipping and unzipping, driving a car around a road play mat, playing with Lego. Activities that include pouring, stirring, mixing, rolling will also help.
Writing, the class teacher will show the children the correct method for letter formation. It is very hard to correct wrong letter formation so please focus on the activites mentioned above instead.
Provide your child with games such as jigsaws and Lego- these activities provide not only the opportunities for children to use and develop finger muscles also challenge them mentally.
Jigsaws / spot the difference: Visual Discrimination lets us see differences between objects that are similar. Good visual discrimination helps keep us from getting confused. For example, when we read, it's visual discrimination that let's us see the "was" and "saw" are different even though they have the same letters. Puzzle games that ask us to tell how two pictures are different (spot the difference) are good ways to help develop visual discrimination. Jigsaws are another great way of developing this skill.
Basic Maths - Maths skills can be helped in lots of ways by helping them to know their
- Colours
- Understand prepositions such as under, over, beside, behind, after, before, inside and outside. Use this vocabulary and play games such as hiding the teddy and getting them to tell you where exactly it was, or ask them to put the teddy in a certain place for example ëPut teddy on top of the chair/behind the bin etc.
- Sorting objects by size, colour, shape. For example put all red things on the table, put all small things into this box.
- And also by asking questions such as ëHow many sweets are on the table? How many chairs are in the kitchen.