Is Your Child Ready for Transitional Kindergarten/Kindergarten? 7 Essential Skills for Success

With increased demands on Transitional Kindergarten (TK) students to enter school with the skills typically expected of Kindergarten (K) students, what will your child need to ensure they succeed in the classroom?

Keri Bowie, Director of Evergreen Learning Center in Goleta, expressed concerns about younger children attending elementary school, saying, “This is one of the first years children in the younger age groups from our center are going to TK. I am apprehensive about putting 4 year olds on an elementary school campus.”

Gabrielle Smith, Kindergarten Lead Teacher at The Knox School of Santa Barbara, emphasizes, “Unfortunately, JK [Junior Kindergarten] and K are age driven and not necessarily developmentally driven”. Therefore, while your child may be at an appropriate age for the TK or K classroom, they may not be at an appropriate developmental stage to handle the expectations of that classroom.

Ms. Bowie states that preschools can make sure they are running a quality program with uninterrupted playtime and a safe space for learning and play for children.  If families have a quality preschool option, Ms. Bowie encourages parents to keep their children there as long as possible.  She affirms, “Everyone in the field needs to know about the emotional and learning needs of younger children.”

While preschools are doing what they can to keep up with the expectations of TK and K classrooms, parents can supplement their child’s educational development with simple but effective activities at home. According to local educators, the following guide can help you facilitate a smooth transition for your child from preschool to TK and K classrooms.

While preschools contribute to your child’s classroom readiness, here is a guide of your child’s needs for a positive transition to TK and K:

Autonomy

All of the teachers stress the importance of autonomy for children. Autonomy can be developed by encouraging children to make their own decisions. Parents can help their child make decisions by providing them with two structured choices, such as, “Would you like to eat bananas or strawberries?”

Practice at home:
According to Kate Keeley, Learning Specialist and former Kindergarten Lead Teacher, and Wendy Fehr, Kindergarten Lead Teacher at The Riviera Ridge School in Santa Barbara, an excellent way for children to practice autonomy by picking out their own clothes. This can help them differentiate what clothes are appropriate to wear to school or outside the home and which clothes are best to wear when they aren’t going anywhere. Allowing children to shop with their parents and pick out clothes that help them feel confident and are appropriate for school is a great place to start.

Self-Help Skills

All of the teachers agree that children need to be able to take care of their own needs. Per Ms. Smith, “I think it’s important for parents to help prepare their students to be increasingly independent while performing daily tasks to ensure success at school”.

Practice at home:
Self-help skills can be practiced at home by encouraging children to use the bathroom independently, including wiping themselves, washing their hands and changing their own clothes as needed. They can also practice independence by opening their own backpacks and lunchboxes, as well as putting on and taking off their jackets.

Attention

According to teachers, children should be able to attend to a less preferred activity for at least 15 minutes. While some children can maintain their focus on screens or extended periods, many have difficulty attending to less preferred activities.

Practice at home:
Parents can prepare children by having them participate in a single adult-directed activity for increasing increments of time, beginning with 5-10 minutes and working up to longer periods of time. This can be implemented through step-by-step tasks or activities that require children to follow directions, like following a simple recipe or completing the steps of a project. Additionally, parents can provide a schedule and ask their child to follow it, helping them sequence activities.

Reading Readiness

Children need experience recognizing and naming letters and making letter sounds. According to the Little by Little School Readiness Program, “Early literacy means helping children develop a rich vocabulary, self-expression, and reading comprehension—tools they need to become successful readers and lifelong learners. These skills allow a young child to enter kindergarten with a love of books and a readiness to learn.”

Practice at Home:
While reading stories, parents can encourage their child to identify letters or simple words in the book. They can also play games where children look around their environment or within a book for the letters letters of the alphabet, beginning with “A”, moving through the alphabet one by one or taking turns with their sibling or parent. Ms. Smith suggests, “Engaging in silly word play – producing rhyming words (even if they are nonsense words: mom, zom, lom, fom…..)”. She also explains, “When driving in the car, it can be a fun thing to point out familiar signs and landmarks. Saying things like ‘we are turning left, we are turning right, red light means stop….’ is a great way to enforce certain reading readiness skills and directionality concepts.”

Name Recognition

It is helpful if children recognize their own name in print and are able to spell it. If they are learning to write their name, parents may want to start by teaching them how to write it in all capital letters. Most Kindergarten teachers would prefer that incoming students recognize and are beginning to write their name using upper case letters only for the first letter.

Practice at home:
The Handwriting Without Tears curriculum is a favorite of mine. I’ve taught many children how to write using this multi-sensory, kinesthetic method. Additional suggestions include, having children write letters in sand, salt or clay using a stick or their fingers.

Fine Motor Skills

Parents and preschools can observe how children hold their pencils, markers and crayons.  By 4 or 5 years old, children should be holding writing utensils using their fingers rather than a full fisted grasp. Per Ms. Keeley and Ms. Fehr, “Children need to enter into Kindergarten being able to hold writing utensils. Starting at the beginning of the year, children will do a lot of cutting and pasting.”

Practice at home:
Parents can help students by offering children craft projects at home. Simple beading, cutting and paper weaving can be fun activities for children to work on over the summer.

Gross Motor Skills

At school, students will work on learning how to do different gross motor movements, rules to gross motor games and adjusting to different play spaces. This allows a child to know where their body is in space and the amount of space their body takes up.

Practice at home:
Parents can work on gross motor skills during the summer such as walking within a particular space, running or other coordination activities. Hopscotch is a great way for children to increase awareness of their body in space as they focus on keeping their balance in between jumps and landing with their feet within the required boxes.

Although practicing at home can help your child prepare for and experience success in Transitional Kindergarten and Kindergarten, supplementing with extra help or further interventions can help facilitate progress.

“Children all develop at a different level”, says Ms. Bowie.  She advises parents to be in communication with the child’s preschool teacher and pediatrician and to make sure that children are meeting the first 5 year milestones per the CDC. “If the child is not meeting the milestones, communication is important,” she adds.

According to Ms. Smith, “Parents should seek extra help at any point they think what they are doing is not working for them and/or their child and they are out of ideas. I think more than ever, parents feel so much pressure to have it all together. There are many resources available to families. If your child’s teacher is not able to directly address an issue you may be having, they can most likely point you in the direction of someone who is able to help”.

Per Ms. Bowie, parents should seek extra help for their children “at any point that they feel they are struggling on their own and have exhausted their resources”.  She states, “I wish all children could get early intervention”.

Thank you to Ms. Smith, Ms. Bowie, Ms. Keeley, Ms. Fehr and Amy Donnell, Kindergarten teacher at Hope School, for your contributions.

Lisa Serby, MA, OTR/L, founder and director of OT Arts, is a licensed and registered occupational therapist.  She has dedicated her practice to the safety and well-being of Santa Barbara’s children and families for over 21 years through school-based and clinical practice.  She empowers children by helping them build the underlying skills needed for TK/K, particularly in the areas of fine and gross motor, self-help and sensory processing/self-regulation. 

Samantha Roos is a recent graduate of Chapman University, pursuing her aspirations of obtaining a doctorate in occupational therapy. She is gaining valuable hands-on experience as an intern with Lisa Serby at OT Arts, where she is developing her skills with the goal of becoming a dedicated occupational therapist.