Assessing your Child's Readiness for Preschool

Series Summary

Preschool education, or nursery school, is the preparation of young children for early childhood education. Though its practices vary from region to region, the ideas are usually the same. In the United States, there are Montessori schools, Head Start programs, and Day Care that emphasize the education of young children. In the United Kingdom, the emphasis is on Early Learning Goals and children attend preschool as early as three years old. Common themes seen in preschools are social development, communication and language development, expansion in knowledge and understanding of the world, aesthetic development and physical development and movement.

Getting your child ready to enter a preschool program can be difficult. In this series of videos, our expert makes it easier for you to understand what works best for young children. Getting a head start on preschool education is the key, and in these helpful videos, you can learn more about teaching your children about shapes, colors, letter, numbers and other subjects. One of the most important aspects of making the preschool transition easier is learning independence. See informative clips that teach you how to be involved in your child’s education!

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Ann and we’re here today to speak about readiness and assessing readiness for school. What it means is to take a checklist and sit down with your child and go over certain skills that will be tested, usually in most schools in the beginning of the school year. One of the things to talk about are shapes, it would be good if you know how to draw a circle, triangle, rectangle, square. It’s important to know position words like in and out, top – middle – bottom, next to – beside, again another important concept is right hand – left hand. These are all concepts that could easily be taught at home and mastered before you even start the school year, so again you have the heads up for the beginning of the school year when they do the assessing of testing readiness. Another concept that’s important is to go over colors, shapes and knowing the parts of a book. The beginning of a book, the ending of a book, where is the title on a book cover, the author and the illustrator. I know this sounds unbelievable, but these are some of the questions that are asked in an assessment for school readiness. "