School Readiness for Young Children :: Mary Duncan [EP68]

Gems of Motherhood

Are your children ready for school? This is a question most parents often contemplate yet don’t realize the complete answer until years later. Truthfully speaking, a child's social, emotional, and behavior skills are equally critical to school success; however, too many children in this country are starting kindergarten without them. My guest, Mary Duncan talks about school readiness in young children.

Mary explains what school readiness means and how to identify it in your own children. Simply put, before a child enters kindergarten, they should be able to recognize shapes, count one through ten, take turns in a play setting and more.

“There’s so many aspects to preparing our children for school. Attention span and bonding is very important, building vocabularies and including new words during specific time of the day is just as important.”

Mary shares how important play is to a child development. And how play is work for children. She also suggests different activities that moms can do with their young children to enhance school readiness. Mary likes to break the five main subject areas which is pre-math, pre-science, pre-social studies, pre-writing and pre-reading. She breaks those down into each of the years and then work on what to build in those foundation pegs. Her timeline for child preparedness is instructive and helpful to cultivating an environment of learning.