🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 🏫 School Readiness — Activities that practice school-like expectations — sitting at a table, listening to instructions, transitioning between activities — directly prepare children for the structure of a kindergarten day.
- 💬 Language & Communication — A child who can express needs clearly, tell a sequential story, ask for help appropriately, and answer questions in complete sentences has the language toolkit that classroom participation requires.
- ⚡ Executive Function — Kindergarten demands enormous executive function: remembering multi-step directions, stopping one activity and starting another, following rules consistently, and managing impulses in a group. Early executive function development is the highest-return kindergarten readiness investment.
- 🎵 Phonological Awareness — Hearing and manipulating sounds in spoken language — rhyming, counting syllables, identifying beginning sounds — is the foundational pre-reading skill that kindergarten reading instruction builds directly on.
Use board games to build math skills necessary to succeed in kindergarten. When playing a board game, a preschooler learns counting skills, identifies numbers in print, and follows rules. The repetition of a board game provides many opportunities to practice these skills in any one game.
Keep in mind these two guidelines.
1. Provide board games with squares that are numbered consecutively and arranged in a linear order. Most board games are arranged in this manner.
2. Spend time playing games on a regular basis. Play for fifteen minutes each weekend or plan a family game night.
Don't buy a game, when you can make your own.
It is not necessary to purchase expensive board games to play. Spend some family time together and make a board game of your own. Most board games have a simple premise; count the number of squares, move around the board and make it to the finish line.
A few basic items are needed to make your own board game:
- Cardboard or poster board, to make the board
- Marker and ruler to make the squares on the board
- Stickers, if you wish to decorate the board or individual pieces
- Milk container caps or caps from bottled water make good pieces to mark your progress on the board
- A die or dice to roll for number of spaces to move
- A zip top freezer bag in which to store the game
One of the easiest type of board games to make is a "race" board. Draw a grid with four "lanes" and approximately twenty squares. Allow your preschooler to decorate it. Decorate your game pieces as well. Assign a starting line and a finish line. In age order, from youngest to oldest, roll the die. Count with your child as they move their game pieces. The first player to the finish line wins or just make it a celebration for each player to finish.
Spending a few minutes playing board games with your preschooler builds math skills they will need in kindergarten. It does not have to be expensive, so there is no excuse not to spend the time with your child. You will be investing in their future academic success.
