🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop
- 🤝 Social Competence — The ability to join a group, initiate friendship, negotiate conflicts, and cooperate toward a shared goal are the social skills that determine whether kindergarten is a joyful or miserable experience.
- 📚 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.
- 🎯 Attention & Persistence — The ability to stay with a task long enough to complete it — without adult redirection — is the single cognitive skill that most distinguishes ready from not-yet-ready kindergarteners in most teachers' experience.
- 🧩 Independence & Self-Care — Managing bathroom needs, eating lunch, and dressing independently gives children the practical autonomy that kindergarten requires — and the self-efficacy of doing things for themselves carries into academic challenges.
Preschoolers learn math in everyday activities. Several concepts form the basis of all preschooler's math learning. Sorting, patterning, ordering, counting, and number recognition are all basic concepts. Let's discuss each of these concepts.
Sorting
Sorting is categorizing a group of objects into groupings of similar features. The feature might be color, shape, size or anything else the objects have in common. Your preschooler is learning the concepts of same and different. Separating blocks by color is a good example of sorting.
Patterning
Patterning is simply making a configuration and repeating it more than once. The preschooler learns first to identify that there is a pattern. As they become more knowledgeable, the preschooler will predict what comes next in the pattern. Using our block example, we would make a pattern with a red block, blue block, red block, blue block. A preschooler nearing kindergarten should be able to predict that in this pattern, the next block will be a red block.
The concept of ordering means classifying items in a set. A preschooler might place different size trucks from smallest to largest or lightest color to darkest color. Again, the older preschooler will be able to identify the concepts of degree, such as most to least and less or more.
Counting
Counting as a concept is more complex. Counting can take the form of rote counting or of object counting. Rote counting is simply memorizing the numbers in the correct order. Many two year olds start to rote count to five. Usually, preschoolers learn to rote count prior to object counting. Object counting is the ability to look at a group of items and physically count how many items are in the group. Preschoolers able to object count can identify the total of the objects in a group.
Number recognition occurs when a preschooler can label a roman numeral with the proper name. A preschooler nearing kindergarten may know the number and associate it with the same amount of items in a group. For example, a preschooler is able to take the number 2 on a piece of paper and place two blocks next to the number when it is requested.
Preschoolers begin to recognize these concepts as things that occur naturally in daily life. As parents of preschoolers, you can learn to pay close attention to the math skills you teach unintentionally. Sort clothes together. Arrange the cans in your cupboard from largest to smallest. Point out the numbers that you see on street signs. Count leaves, flowers, or rocks. These activities are developing your preschooler's logic skills and will allow them to be successful math students as they enter kindergarten.
