Kindergarten Readiness

How important is it to  push your children to read young

Parents seem to be running scared if their children will be ready for kindergarten.

This really translates into will my child be successful. Will she learn how to read quickly, will he make me proud, will she fail in school. will she be up to par? Etc.

Alot of this hysteria comes the creators of all of the phonics games and other educational learning toys that the companies that create them say you must have to prepare your children to read for kindergarten at a very young age.

For many teachers this means, this concentrating on kindergarten readiness is really a concern if l this child be ready to learn his ABCs.

I am going to dispel some myths in this article and I am going to explain to you the best way to truly prepare your children for reading readiness or kindergarten readiness or life readiness.

Myths:

• Reading is the first REAL learning that children really do
• There is no real learning before reading
• There is no real value to play
• Kids need to get play out of their systems so they can get ready for real learning

All of the above are oft repeated sound bites that are patently false.

What is real learning and intellectual development and how does it relate to kindergarten and reading readiness?

One thing has to be made clear....the skill of reading does not equal to intellectual development.

Learning how to read does not make one smarter, it is a set mechanical skills and what reading does is unlock the treasure to intellectual development.

Reading is decoding   Intellectual development comprises of conceptualization, the ability to compare, the ability to analyze, hypothesize, and great  curiosity in the world around us.

A human beings mind can grow deep and wide without reading at all but reading is an open door to an open ever expansive mind.

What do we all remember from our school experiences

“Sequentially prescribed, fact learning dependent on the ability to read” as said by Dorothy Cohen author of The Learning Child.

How do children learn without reading and for that matter how does anyone learn without reading.

The fact is through all of our senses. We see, we hear, we feel and touch, we taste.

We learn what tastes good and what doesn’t. We see how things work and can tell how to fix them. We watch a political process and learn how government works.

It’s when we read that we take our learning further.

The difference between adults learning without reading and children learning without reading is crucial.

Piaget the famous psychologist discovered how children learn by doing many many testes using the children themselves

“His view of how children's minds work and develop has been  enormously influential, particularly in educational theory.  His particular insight was the role of maturation  (simply growing up) in children's increasing  capacity to understand their world: they cannot  undertake certain tasks until they are psychologically  mature enough to do so.”

He discovered that children MUST interact with the concrete world and learn FIRSTLY with their senses.

He learned that children who are given things to learn before they are ready for it cannot learn well.

Reading is a series of symbols that stand for things. Children need lots of experience with things before they can apply this knowledge to abstract concepts.

He determined therefor that there is nothing gained by an early start in trying to get children learning abstract concepts like letters and numbers instead much can be lost in later years.

IQ is not what determines if kids are ready for reading.

To prove this point there was a study done with 5th grade kids that were struggling with reading.

All of these kids in the fifth grade had similar IQ scores. They also had all had Rorschach tests done on them when they were younger as part of standard physiological testing and was discovered was that that all of the children that were struggling with reading had had difficulty with their Rorschach scores which tells if children have problems seeing parts of a whole.

That translates into children having difficulty with seeing differences.

Children that have difficulty seeing differences will have great difficulty in reading.

It has also been proven that children that start learning to read later do better later in life.

Young children need lots of sensory experiences that they can turn into abstract symbols later on.

You can get kids to recognize symbols like ABCs and numbers but NO ONE can get kids to think with these symbols before they are ready.

Rote learning of symbols in often successful in the beginning but very unreliable for long term like helping the children love reading.

So don’t worry if your children don’t know their ABC’s before they go into Kindergarten. The experiences you can give them by talking to them, teaching them about the world around you, reading to them and encouraging their curiosity will go alot further than teaching them their ABS’c.