What Might Affect a Child’s Readiness for School?

School Readiness not just about the children’s cognitive and language skills. It’s also about their emotional maturity, social skills, independence and physical health. This way, they will be truly ready for the big school and that they’ll have fun learning and making friends as well.

What might affect a child’s readiness for school?

How do you ensure that your child will be ready for school? As a parent, what can you do to help?

One way is to choose an early learning centre with a comprehensive school readiness program. At Footsteps Early Learning Centre, our school readiness program is integrated into our daily curriculum that has been developed using the Early Years Learning Framework with an intentional School Readiness teaching session each day. Our school readiness program has been developed in consultation with local Kindergarten teachers and schools. It covers all aspects of the key developmental learning areas and introduces the 6 Key Learning Areas of the NSW Kindergarten curriculum.

Our program provides opportunity for each child to extend on their interests and needs, developing opportunities for encouraging the skills needed for starting school.

A thorough school readiness program includes preparing the children’s minds about what a real school environment looks and feels like. Here, we endeavour to a visit to a local school so that children will actually see and feel the school environment (we also let them experience some of the school activities).

Our goal is to help children feel confident about the new environment they’re about to go in. For them, the school environment could be an unfamiliar and intimidating place. Our role here is to make the environment familiar and seem like a safe place. We do this by helping children build their self-reliance and giving them confidence to ask questions in front of other children and adults (such as practicing raising their hands to ask questions during group activities).

Confidence and independence are the keys for school readiness (aside from the essential cognitive skills so that your child can keep up with other kids). This way, your child will feel comfortable and he/she can better focus on learning and having fun.