According to Adele Keyser*, teacher and contributor to the Worksheet Cloud website, the 5 key areas of school readiness are:

1. Physical and Motor Development: including gross motor skills, fine motor skills, perceptual development (both visual and auditory), and taking care of themselves.
2. Emotional and Social Development: emotionally well-adjusted and gets along with peers, can express feelings and needs, can share, can sit still for a period of time, can concentrate on a task for a reasonable amount of time and able to deal with frustration in an acceptable way.
3. Cognitive Development: can make independent decisions and follow through, has ideas of their own, can follow simple directions or instructions and shows an interest in learning.
4. Language Development: (this includes literacy, listening, speaking and vocabulary): should be able to communicate effectively in home language, be able to sequence (retell a story or a set of events) and identify similarities and differences between objects.
5. Emotional maturity: independence, reasonable control over emotions, basic problem solving skills, confidence, shows responsibility and handles separation well.

So, how can you help your child to be school-ready?

Adele has the following tips to offer:

• Read to your child.
• Teach your child songs, nursery rhymes and poems.
• Take your child on excursions e.g. to a museum.
• Make regular opportunities for play-dates.
• Play games so that your child starts recognising colours, numbers and letters.

By the time children are entering Grade 1, they should:

• Have minds crammed with concrete and semi-concrete experiences.
• Have been exposed to abstract concepts in concrete ways for years.
• Use the language spoken in the Grade 1 classroom spontaneously to converse, learn and reason.
• Have had ample opportunity to play outside, so that they are now ready for and eager to experience the primary school adventure.

Read the full article here: http://www.motherandchild.co.za/family-planning/preparing-your-child-for-big-school/