My child’s transition to school…Ready or not?
In this blog, I will talk through my own knowledge and experience on school readiness based on my teacher training, the vast training from courses whilst working here at The Learning Tree and links with local schools in what will be useful for you to know and how to support you and your child in preparing for this next step.
The statutory framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), describes school readiness as ‘giving children the broad range of knowledge and skills that provide the right foundation for good future progress through school and life.’
School readiness is something that is extremely familiar to any Early Years practitioner and is something that parents are eager to know more about when preparing their child for their next part of their journey in heading to school.
When a child moves onto school we know that this is probably going to be one of the biggest transitions they will make during their early years but what does ‘school readiness’ mean? Also, how do we support this?
Here we go then, what we have been doing since your child started with us is really the basis of preparing your child for school. We work with both you and your child to develop some straightforward practical and social skills, including:
Supporting your child to independently use the toilet.
Supporting your child to wipe their own nose.
Being able to independently put on simple items of clothing such as their coat and easy to fasten shoes.
Sitting together with their peers, such as listening to a story or adult guided activity.
Encouraging your child to talk about their ideas, initiate activities and make decisions.
Support your child to feel socially, emotionally and physically secure to enable them to behave appropriately and become confident active learners using all of their senses.
Develop their concentration, becoming deeply involved in activities.
Supporting your child to play and work co-operatively, learning to accept others’ differences, to be resilient and to question.
Supporting your child to play and work independently, at times without close supervision, taking responsibility, for example by caring for their environment.
Follow instructions and responding to questions.
Eat meals in small groups, trying new foods and flavours.
Start to recognise their name.
Have a curiosity about the world and a desire to learn.
As you can see from the above points school readiness is not about starting a formal approach to learning as early as possible, children will learn and develop mainly through play.
It cannot be stressed enough how truly valuable play opportunities are for your child and how much they are gaining from this. They are learning about the world around them at their own pace and making important connections in their thinking which leads to deep level learning. Please also remember your child is still in the Early Years when they leave us to go to Reception and being monitored through the same foundations and framework that we use at nursery, we will ensure that we talk to your child’s new teacher discussing how they are doing and mainly talking to them about your child and their interests and the above points mentioned.
These are all the main things that are really important for your child and what we do as a setting and what we will always continue to do in supporting you and your child to be school-ready.
Written by – Samantha Coakley – Area Manager and Early Years Teacher
