School readiness: What is it and what does your child need to be able to do?
School-ready children are mentally, physically and socially well equipped for the demands of school. Find out here which skills are important for school readiness and what you can do to promote your child’s school readiness.
School readiness: Is your child fit for school?
School readiness refers to the stage of development of a child who is ready for school in terms of his physical and mental abilities. In the meantime, a child’s school readiness is usually referred to by the term “school readiness”.
Before you let your child start school, he should be determined to be ready for school. This ensures that your child is not overwhelmed at school, but has a good start to the first school year. A school-ready child does not have to be able to read perfectly, it learns that at school. But it should have acquired the skills and prerequisites it needs to learn reading, writing and arithmetic.
What should your child be able to do when you start school?
A child’s school readiness is not only shown by the fact that he can already count or write his name in kindergarten. The ability to listen, stand on one leg or play peacefully with other children are also important when starting school. Because not only the intelligence of your child makes the school readiness, but also other areas of development:
- Physical development
- Intellectual development
- Motor development
- Language development
- Emotional development
- Social development
If you want to know what your child should be able to do when it starts school, you can read our article “Checklist school readiness: Is your child ready for school?” inform about the most important signs of school readiness.
This is how you can promote school readiness
With a few simple measures, you can prepare your child optimally for school, because school readiness can be promoted. With these tricks you can make your child fit for school enrolment:
- Grant self-employment: You should be careful not to relieve your child of all the tasks. So they can learn to take responsibility and manage things on their own, even if it takes longer than with your help. You should give your child room for their own ideas and give them the opportunity to try things out for themselves.
- Contact with other children: If you allow your child frequent contact with other children, you can promote his or her social skills. In kindergarten, in the sports club, on appointments with friends or while playing with the neighbor’s children, your child learns how to behave in a group, how to solve conflicts or how to assert his own interests.
- Conveying a wide range of experiences: In order to broaden your child’s horizons of experience, you can take interesting and educational excursions with him, for example to the zoo, the museum, the farm or the forest. But also through various leisure activities, such as sports, swimming, dancing or music, you can promote the development of your child. In this way, you help your child to be more open to new experiences.
- Lots of movement: If your child moves a lot, his finemotor skills, i.e. the ability to control small, fine movements, can develop better. This is an important prerequisite for learning to write. In addition, children who have enough exercise can concentrate better.
- Reading books aloud: If you read to your child regularly, you can not only positively influence your child’s linguistic development, but also strengthen his or her interest in reading. This will help your child cope better at school.
- Games: With board games you can also promote the school readiness of your child. It can playfully practice sticking to rules, sometimes losing and working together with its teammates.
- Have conversations and singchildren’s songs: In order to support your child’s linguistic development, you can talk to him intensively about all sorts of topics. So your child can not only improve his or her ability to express himself, but also practice listening, asking questions and answering. Even if you sing regularly with your child, it has a positive effect on his language development.
Test for school readiness
At theschool entrance examination, a test for school readiness is often carried out. However, such test procedures do not provide entirely clear results. Because if your child behaves differently than usual in the unfamiliar test situation or refuses any answers, this can falsify the test results. Another problem is that the school readiness test is only a snapshot. For example, if your child is in a bad mood or tired that day, this will also be reflected in the result.
A general prediction of whether your child will cope in school or not is therefore not possible with such a test procedure. That’s why you should observe your child closely and also talk to the pediatrician and the kindergarten teachers to find out whether your child shows signs of school readiness or whether there is still a need for support.