If your child is turning four this calendar year, it’s time to register them for kindergarten. But how do you know if they are ready for this big step?
Is my child ready for kindergarten?
While children develop at different rates, especially at a young age, here are some of the skills most children will have acquired by the time they start kindergarten:
Receptive skills:
Answer simple questions (who, what, where, when).
Understand a variety of basic concepts such as big/little, wet/dry, hot/cold, long/short, up/down.
Understand location words such as in, on, under, behind, beside, and in front of.
Can follow two to three step directions.
Understand common action words and common objects and people when named.
Respond when their name is called from another room.
Understand some colour and shape words (blue, green, red, circle, square).
Begin to understand basic categorization vocabulary such as clothing, food, or vehicles.
Expressive skills:
Take turns while talking.
Infer information from stories including indirect meaning.
Use indirect requests with demonstrative terms (this, that, here, there).
Can be understood by most people.
Use pronouns (I, you, we, he, she, they).
Combine four or more words in a sentence, sometimes with grammatical errors.
Can retell the steps of a familiar routine, such as brushing their teeth.
Literacy skills:
Participate in rhyming.
Enjoy listening to stories.
Know some letters.
Hold books upright.
Make up stories based on the pictures in books.
Play skills:
Show fantasy schemes in play (pretend play).
Can play on their own and with others, sometimes cooperatively.
Share interest in what other children are doing.
Take a leader or a follower role in play.
Articulation skills:
Use all early developing sounds in all different word positions: ‘b, p, m, w, n, h, t, d’ and all vowel sounds.
Can produce ‘k’, ‘g’ and ‘ng’ sounds (e.g. “cat”, “go”, “king”).
Can produce /s/ blend words (e.g. “spot”, “swim”, etc.).
Can produce /f, s/ sounds and are starting to use other airy sounds: /z,v/ (e.g. “fish”, “soap”).
Are intelligible greater than 90% of the time by an unfamiliar person.
What if my child doesn’t have all these skills?
Remember that all children develop differently, and kindergarten programming will help them continue to master these important skills.
However, if your child is having noticeable difficulty in one or more of these areas, they might benefit from additional support before starting school. Among the many services we offer to children, we provide assessment and therapy for articulation, early language development, fluency, and language support.
If you would like to schedule an appointment or learn more, please feel free to contact us.