Building a Foundation: Kindergarten’s Role in Cultivating Five Essential Skills for Your Child’s Future
Selecting a preschool is a crucial decision for parents, as a child’s initial 10 years serve as a pivotal period for acquiring essential social, emotional, creative, and academic skills that form a sturdy foundation for their future. Life skills, rooted in executive functions, amalgamate social, emotional, and cognitive abilities crucial for problem-solving and goal achievement.
Providing life skills and opportunities for children to succeed in all developmental fields, kindergarten enables children to become confident learners under a conducive and supported environment. It also serves as a key learning foundation for your little one in their upcoming academic journey, fostering their growth and development through play and interaction. Wondering what your children will learn as part of the typical kindergarten curriculum? Read this article to gain a better understanding.
1. Literacy Skills
Upon preschool registration, it is best for you as a parent to identify what your child will learn in kindergarten. Letters and sounds are the fundamentals for writing, reading, and speaking correctly, laying a solid foundation for children’s literacy skills. They are usually taught in a fun and approachable way, ensuring that your child can recognise all 26 letters of the alphabet, in both capital and small letters. By the end of the lesson, your child should be able to pronounce each letter correctly.
You may also read to your children at home, further encouraging the adoption of this good habit. During reading sessions, your children naturally encounter unfamiliar words that may not arise in everyday conversations. This exposure plays a pivotal role in enriching their language skills. Furthermore, reading time helps them to grasp basic concepts associated with books and printed materials, including identifying elements such as the title, author, and illustrator of a picture book. This heightened awareness of the formation of words from letters and language structure boosts your child’s language and literacy skills.
On the other hand, writing simple words by understanding consonants and vowels will be taught to your children in kindergarten. As they gain confidence in forming words, children progress to writing short sentences composed of these simple words. These sentences are usually very basic and revolve around everyday experiences. At The Schoolhouse by Busy Bees, our Real World programme empowers children to grasp fundamental reading and writing skills through daily experiences and observations. This establishes a solid foundation, fostering their ability to communicate confidently with both peers and adults.
2. Numeracy Skills
Before beginning with simple maths, students at kindergartens in Singapore will first be taught to recognise, count and write objects up to a specific number, for instance, 20. After familiarising with the numerals, kindergarteners will learn simple addition and subtraction with small numbers. Meanwhile, some parents practise counting with their child at home, in order to help them achieve their kindergarten goals. At kindergarten, children are also taught to tell time. It is vital for children to grasp the basic concepts of time through their daily activities, such as going to school at 7am, having dinner at 6pm, and sleeping at 9pm. This enables them to determine the time of day-to-day events to the nearest hour.
3. Motor Skills and Spatial Awareness
Kindergarten curriculum will also include identification of common shapes like circle, rectangle, triangle and square. Your child will learn to differentiate each shape and be able to describe them. This eventually helps them to sort and classify objects by shape, size, and colour. Recognising and describing shapes involves activities such as drawing, tracing, and manipulating objects. The process requires precise hand-eye coordination and control, which are fundamental aspects of fine motor skills. Generally, children are encouraged to organise their toys during a lesson. For instance, they may need to collect same-size blocks into a pile, or arrange Legos by colours.
No doubt, lessons taught in kindergartens pave the way for your child’s future learning journey. In addition, the role of “play” at an early age should not be underestimated as well. The Schoolhouse by Busy Bees is well aware of how a good programme should encapsulate opportunities for growth through play and fun activities. That is why an inquiry-embedded play based approach has been established. We believe that through play, children observe, explore, and eventually be inspired to ask, wonder, and find solutions when they encounter a problem, boosting critical thinking from a young age. On the other hand, there are also distinctive learning programmes available at The Schoolhouse by Busy Bees, such as the Maker House and Musical Tankers, preschool enrichment classes, which are equally beneficial for your child.
The Schoolhouse by Busy Bees operates 17 preschools and 5 infant care centres in Singapore. We are always ready to deliver a joyful learning experience for your children to realise their fullest potential. Give us a call today if you wish to nurture your little one to become a global minded citizen in this 21st century.
