Being Ready for School

Developing independence

• Encourage your child to develop their self-help skills such as putting on and removing their socks, shoes, jumpers and coats.
• Develop your child’s independence in toileting, handwashing and general hygiene.
• Encourage your child to tidy away their toys once they are finished playing with them.
• Encourage them to look after their possessions.
• Leave comforters such as favourite toys and blankets at home when you go on day trips and journeys.
• Develop independence at meal time by encouraging your child to practise opening their lunchbox themselves, eating with a knife and fork and getting used to trying new foods
• Encourage your child to listen and respond in conversations. It is important that they get used to waiting their turn to speak.
  
  

Listening and attention

Work with your child to develop their concentration and listening skills. Some activity suggestions include:

• Go on a listening walk and listen carefully to all the different sounds you hear. What are those sounds?
• Use your voice to make sounds like a car, a dog, ghost, a train.
• Make a noise shaker and create some music with different patterns.
• Sing some nursery songs that have rhyming words. Can you hear the rhymes?
• Play a game of I Spy. What’s the first sound of your word?
• Go on a letter sound hunt. Can you find 3 things that begin with ‘t’? What other letters can you choose?
• Enjoy playing turn taking and simple board games together.
• Show interest and pay attention to a subject or stimulus.
• Help them to make observations, notice things and ask questions.
  
  

Fine motor skills

Work on fine motor skills to develop control needed for handling a pencil. Some activity suggestions include:

• Pushing pipe cleaners through a colander
• Posting pennies in a money box
• Threading buttons/ beads onto string
• Dropping pompoms into empty bottles
• Using pegs to attach things to a washing line
• Scrunching paper into a tight ball and aiming at a bin
• Using tweezers to pick up objects and put them into a container
• Paper weaving
• Tiny sponge painting
• ‘Painting’ with paintbrushes and water

Preparation for starting school

• Have lots of conversations about starting school – share stories about starting school, use photographs to remind your child of their new school, their class name and staff names.
• Encourage them to recognise their own name.
• Establish good eating and sleeping routines.
• Support them to follow instructions around the house.
• Set clear boundaries, and encourage good manners.
• Support them to communicate their needs to adults verbally, or with signs.
• Familiarise your child with numbers up to 20 in the environment, e.g. door numbers, in supermarkets, counting out raisins, saying one number for each item.
• Limit the amount of time your child spends on technological equipment (e.g. iPads, phones), especially at meal times and in the hour before bedtime.

The importance of Play

Play is the brain’s favourite way of learning.  Therefore, it is important that children are encouraged to:

• Play, have fun and seek adventure, including in the great outdoors
• Ask questions
• Discover new things for themselves
• Explore and be inquisitive about the world around them.
• Imagine stories
• Interact and socialise with adults and children