All the latest scientific research – and our experience as clinicians – shows that children who have the skills to cope happily with the school environment in the early stages are at an advantage in terms of their later development and progress. But there is much evidence too that far too many children are arriving for their first experience at school lacking many of the basic skills. This is as much an issue for self care, emotional, behavioural and social skills as for intellectual and educational development. That’s why we have written Prepare Your Child for School: How to make sure your child gets off to a flying start.
The myriad skills required can be taught and are just too important to leave to chance. We are not talking about hothousing here or about pushing children beyond the limits with which they can cope. This is not a book about teaching children to read or obtain a higher IQ at the expense of knowing how to make friends and to be emotionally intelligent. Our aim is to help parents (and nannies or nursery carers) to be confident in their parenting role and to make sure that their child is as competent in all the core skills as possible. Parents – who need only strive to be ‘good enough’ (not ‘perfect’) – who have the strategies to deal with difficult issues or behaviours in their offspring will themselves be more effective and content. So too will their children.
Getting up to speed with educational learning skills
Children who start school having mastered, or who are at least comfortably familiar with, the foundation skills of reading, writing and number are going to feel more able to manage the next stages of formal school. Importantly these foundations skills are acquired during the pre-school years. We are talking here not about learning words or books by rote but about helping children become aware of alphabet letters and of sounds that make up words. Children who have established these foundation skills will be less likely to fall behind their peers in their education and so hopefully avoid the cycle of demoralisation and poor motivation that even bright children can fall into.
Learning to learn: the background skills
Much needs to happen to achieve this educational goal. Good language skills are critical. Language is needed for the child’s understanding of the world, for relationships with others and for coping in the classroom. Children’s attention and concentration skills need to be sufficiently well developed to be able take in what is said to them and so to maximise their learning. The skills relating to appropriate behaviour (at home as well as at school), getting on with others and becoming emotionally robust and happy need to be developed well before school starts. All these impact strongly on learning and the overall success of the child’s school experience. Children are at a positive advantage at school if they know how to manage adults’ expectations of their behaviour in a classroom group, if they know how to make friends and to cope well with small upsets.
The benefits of play and everyday tasks and routines
Parents who engage in active play with their pre-schoolers are already helping them develop into children who can cope confidently with school. When children play they learn all kinds of skills – fine motor (small movements, for example useful for writing) and gross motor (bigger movements good for sport and general fitness), getting on with others one-to-one or in a group, using their imagination and all kinds of practical skills at the same time. And it’s surprising how play and the routine tasks such as shopping or preparing food or travelling can be subtly used to make pre-reading, pre-writing and early number skills exciting and stimulating. Parents can ask in a supermarket which is the ‘bigger’ packet, how many pieces of fish you need to feed everybody at supper, which colours match which products… and the foundations of formal maths are being set in place.
Parenting skills
From the beginning the approach parents take with their children (or style of parenting) will set the tone. The best parenting style is the ‘authoritative’ one, neither too authoritarian (this gives children a very bad example and can encourage aggressive behaviour) nor too laissez-faire. It’s the balance that’s critical. The right approaches over the pre-school years – moderate control with encouraging and caring guidance – will spare parent and child a lot of pain. Lots of praise and structured reward schemes can help set up routines and promote clear expectations for behaviour. In turn these can help to nip in the bud crises of misbehaviour and desperation in parents. Setting up routines for the basic ‘self care’ areas of bedtime and sleeping habits, mealtimes and eating, dressing, undressing and managing unaided in the toilet can do much to prevent problems and stop the development of a battleground between parent and child. Children who know what is expected of them and when will find the routines of school very much easier to deal with than those who do not.
Ten essentials for a flying start to school
- Organise and structure the bed-time, meal-time and getting up routines especially in the run up to or during a school term.
- Use rewards and praise (generously with pre-school age children) to encourage good behaviour and set up clear guidelines or ‘boundaries’ for acceptable/unacceptable behaviour.
- Help your child make friends and gain allies in the classroom by arranging play dates with children who will be in the class. Do also get to know and socialise with the parents; you will be providing a good model for the children about how to organise their social lives and how to relate to guests and friends as well as strengthening the likelihood of allies in the class.
- Don’t leave your child and a playmate to ‘get on with it’ by themselves. Use the opportunity to assist in a low-key way to make sure the atmosphere stays friendly and to promote social skills, such as turn taking, making initiations in play, responding appropriately to others’ initiations and dealing with not getting their own way. This will also assist in the development of strategies to avoid bullying or becoming a victim of bullying.
- Teach your child to sit quietly and play for 10-15 minutes and to complete activities once started and encourage your child to listen and respond to simple instructions such as ‘hang up your coat’.
- Develop your child’s language by talking together about what you are doing and what you see around you; expand on what your child says and provide a ‘model’ of good vocabulary and grammar.
- Read a short story to your child every day to develop vocabulary and awareness of books, printed words and letters. It should be a pleasurable experience for both and so a good opportunity for parent-child bonding.
- Do lots of nursery rhymes and I-Spy games to develop your child’s awareness of sounds within words; this is a very important pre-reading skill.
- Provide lots of opportunities for counting, comparing size and shape of objects, measuring and creating patterns through play activities and day-to-day routines like shopping, cooking and setting the table, as preparation for abstract maths at school.
- Do lots of pre-writing activities and games, like painting, colouring in, dot-to-dot, and pattern making to develop good pre-writing skills as well as for fun, creative times.
- And remember, don’t pressurise you child to perform or make comparisons with others of their age; there is a wide range of what is normal. And children need time to relax and just be themselves.
Finally, our aim is to help parents make the best use of their time spent with their child, so that in the long run they will spend less time dealing with concerns or difficult behaviour and have more enjoyable time together. This provides the sound basis for a child’s flying start at school and in the months and years that follow. |
