Getting your preschooler ready for school
School readiness isn't really about the alphabet. After 18 years in early childhood, here's what I think actually matters in the year before Prep.
Every January I get the same question from families: "Is my child ready for school?" And every year I give roughly the same answer, readiness is much less about academic skills than parents expect, and much more about the quiet, harder-to-measure stuff.
Can your child sit on a mat for ten minutes without coming undone? Can they ask a grown-up for help when they need it? Can they recover from disappointment, losing a turn, dropping a sandwich, without it ruining the morning? Those are the things that make a Prep classroom work.
The good news: these are all things four- and five-year-olds learn through play and through being with other children. Block towers teach planning. Dress-ups teach negotiation. Even the squabbles over the green crayon are practice for the social work of school.
What you can do at home is gentler than you think. Read together every day, even just for ten minutes. Let them help with small tasks (pouring milk, packing their bag, choosing tomorrow's clothes). And talk to them, properly talk, the way you would to a friend. The vocabulary, the back-and-forth, the listening, that's literacy, before it ever touches a page.
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