Can they write their name? Do they know their letters? Can they count to twenty?
These are the questions we hear most from families with a four year old, and they come from a good place. Every parent wants to send a child who is ready.
At Little Jungle Early Learning in Dundas, we take that seriously. We just think the list is shorter than most families expect, and different.
Kindergarten teachers rarely name an academic skill when asked what makes a child settle well.
Why this matters more than most families realise
Ask a kindergarten teacher what separates the children who settle in the first term, and you get the same answers.
Can the child separate from a parent and recover. Can they ask an adult for help. Can they work out a disagreement over a toy. Can they stay with something that has gone wrong. Can they manage their own bag, lunchbox and shoes.
None of that is academic. All of it is learnable. And all of it takes a year, not a term.
If you are reading that list and thinking your child is not there yet, that is exactly what the year before school is for.
Built into everything we do, all day
Working with someone who wants to do it differently. Negotiating rather than winning.
Having a plan fail. And deciding what to try next, with an educator alongside rather than stepping in.
Asking for help. Which is a skill, and one that takes practice.
Real decisions, all day. Confident children come from feeling heard, not from being kept busy.
The Little Jungle difference
The pre-literacy and numeracy work in Jungle Explorers is real and it is planned. Letters, sounds, early number, writing.
The larger part of the year is project work, where children choose a direction and follow it across days or weeks. That is where the rest of the list gets built, because a project that runs for three weeks will go wrong at some point, and how a child handles that is the whole lesson.
A preschool year can be built around preparing for a first day. We build ours around the first year, because that is the part that gets hard in week three when a parent is not there.
The children who do well in kindergarten are the ones who can recover when something goes wrong.
If your child is at preschool age, this is the year that counts. Book a tour and ask us what we would work on with them, or call on 1300 192 598.
