🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 🎵 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.
- 📚 Pre-Literacy Skills — Letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and print concepts developed before kindergarten are the strongest predictors of first-grade reading success — and every literacy-rich preschool experience compounds this advantage.
- 💬 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.
Rhyming is a fun activity for preschoolers. Not only is rhyming fun, but it builds important skills in preschoolers preparing to enter kindergarten. Rhyming builds memory skills and phoenimical awareness in preschoolers. Phoenimical Awareness is the ability to recognize separate sounds within words. This awareness must be present to learn to read. These funming activities build skills necessary pre-reading skills.
Act out a nursery rhyme.
Using simple household items can mean hours of fun for your preschooler. Provide clothing and props for your preschooler. Recite the poems while acting them out. Demonstrate the action first, then allow your preschooler to do the same. For example, the nursery rhyme Little Boy Blue might have a blue shirt, a horn of some type, and a stuffed sheep. Mary Had A Little Lamb could use a stuffed sheep, as well. Humpty Dumpty props could include plastic easter eggs and blocks to build a wall. A preschooler uses his cognitive skills while pretending and may memorize the rhyme faster while acting it out.
Record yourself reading rhymes.
Provide a book of the rhymes and allow your preschooler to read along to the tape. Your child will enjoy the familiarity of your voice on the tape. Listening to the tape repeatedly will help your preschooler build her memory skills. Reading along with a book helps preschoolers to understand that words have meaning.
Do finger plays.
"The Itsy Bitsy Spider" or "Where is Thumbkin?" are great examples of finger plays. Show your preschooler how to move their fingers and sing along with the actions. Preschoolers love the silliness of finger plays such as "Bringing Home A Baby Bumblebee." An added benefit of these fingerplays is the fine motor skills your preschooler will practice as he acts the rhyme out with his hands.
Make up your own silly rhymes.
Use daily activities as an opportunity to work on rhyming skills with your preschooler. Every event is an opportunity to be silly and to illustrate the concept of rhyming. Going to the grocery store can make a rhyme, "Let's get out the door and get to the store." Then point out the rhyme. Often an older preschooler will start to understand the concept of rhyming and participate in the game.
Rhyming with your preschooler will give them the understanding of sounds that is necessary to read. Adding these activities into daily routines and play time will give your preschooler more opportunities to practice skills that will improve the pre-reading skills and improve academic skills necessary to succeed in kindergarten.
