So your soon-to-be five-year-old will be heading into kindergarten in September. Where did the time go?
Handing your child over to the school system will be a scary experience, probably more for you than for your child, but you have done everything the experts suggest you could be doing to help your child be ready.
Some kindergarten classmates will already be able to read basic storybooks, while others will not yet be able to distinguish between a letter and a number.
You have read the studies that suggest that as many as a third of children enter school unprepared to learn. They lack the vocabulary, sentence structure and other basic skills required to do well in school.
There is overwhelming and indisputable empirical evidence that children who are read to at least three times per week, or even more, do much better not only in kindergarten but all the way up through the grades than children who are read to fewer than three times per week, if at all.
That’s why you began reading to your child at an early age. Even as early as nine months of age, so child psychologists tell us, infants can appreciate books that are interesting to touch or that make sounds.
You know that children’s experience with books plays an important role and that many children enter school with thousands of hours of experience with books, while other children enter school with fewer than 25 hours of shared book-reading, if even that much.
Yet for the next 13 years, books and attitudes toward books and reading will dominate school experiences for better or worse.
About one in 10 children enter kindergarten needing help to develop normal speech and language skills. Without help, it’s a struggle to listen and talk, it’s difficult to learn to read and it’s hard to play with other children.
Talking, listening and playing with your child will have helped to build the skills he or she needs to succeed in the classroom and, just as importantly, in the playground.
That’s why you’ve always talked with your child and included him or her in conversations. Again, numerous studies confirm that children will need well-developed communication skills when it’s time to start going to school. The all-important ability to make friends, learn new things, and start learning to read and write will be based, partly at least, on his or her experience with vocabulary.
So what else can you do to ensure a smooth transition to formal education and class-based learning? Is there one other key strategy that will help your child be properly outfitted as you both stand, hand in hand, staring at the uncertainties and challenges the next 13 years will bring?
Yes, and it is based both in extensive research and your grandmother’s common sense.
A recent report in Scientific American by Carol S. Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, suggests that praising effort by your child rather than praising intelligence equips even very young children with a more positive attitude to facing new challenges in learning.
More than 35 years of scientific investigation, says Dweck, suggests that an over-emphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.
So instead of “how clever you are to have done that drawing,” Dweck suggests: “You did a good job drawing. I like the detail you added to the people’s faces.”
Instead of “how intelligent you must be to figure that out,” Dweck suggests: “You tried a lot of different strategies on that problem until you finally got it. That was hard, but you stuck with it until you got it done.”
Dweck suggests that praising a child’s intelligence makes a child fragile and defensive. Praise, however, can be valuable if it is praise for the specific process a child used to accomplish something. That, says Dweck, fosters motivation and reinforces confidence by focusing children on the actions that lead to success.
And it is that kind of “I can” confidence every five-year-old needs from that first kindergarten day and onward for 13 years.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
