🎓 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.

Math is more than just counting and adding. A preschooler learns to understand the concepts of math through everyday activities. Using common activities and household items allows the preschool aged child to practice math skills. Help a preschooler learn math in a fun-filled way by using these five simple math activities.

1. Measuring.
   Preschoolers love to measure. Provide a ruler, measuring tape or measuring cups to your preschooler. Explain that the marks on each of these items has a meaning. Use the ruler to measure a favorite stuffed animal. Assist her in measuring the length of a room. Allow her to measure flour for a recipe while cooking a meal. Talk about the concepts of big and small. Introduce numbers when making measurements. Count scoops while cooking. Each of these concepts are important to understanding math.
   
2. Make A Height Chart.
   This is a long term measuring project that requires a bit of patience. Measure your child's height over time. Mark it on a door frame or on a purchased height chart that you have hung on the wall. Show him that he has grown over time. A preschooler loves to be "big" and see how much "bigger" he has grown. The height chart frequently becomes a keepsake for parents as their preschooler grows.
   
3. Graphing.
   Now that much of the house has been measured and weighed, graph it. Graphing does not have to be complicated. Start simply initially. The previous activity of making a height chart is a simple graph. After measuring an item, help make a graph of the results. Use graph paper and color a square in for each inch or foot of an item, then repeat for another item. Compare the two items. Discuss which item is less/more or smaller/bigger.

Activities using measurement provide preschoolers concrete examples of how math works in real life. A preschooler learns by watching, listening and touching. Measuring and graphing activities combine each of these elements. Preschoolers learn math and have fun with the activities as well. These activities may be easily changed to use in many different situations.