What Dose a 5 Yr. Old Need to Know by the Time They Enter Kindergarden?

Technically, they don't "have" to know anything. That said, everything they do know will make things go smoother and set them up to have a positive attitude about school. Colors, letters, shapes and counting are the basics. While you are saying the alphabet, it is great if you can also introduce the sounds the letters make. One thing that all kinder and 1st grade teachers will appreciate more than you can know is if they can tie their own shoes! You can't imagine how many times a day we tie shoes.

Get on your local school's website, find the email address for a couple of kindergarten teachers, and ask them what they expect a child to know coming into kindergarten. That may be your best source of information.

Hello Y.,

With so many kids going to pre-k, it seems like just knowing the alphabet is not enough anymore. I love the leapfrog videos: letter factory, talking words factory, talking words factory 2 - code word caper. Here is the link from amazon so you can read about them:
http://www.amazon.com/Leap-Frog-Letter-Factory-Leapfrog/d...

I've seen them at walmart and sams club. My kids' pre-k teachers thought those were wonderful. good luck! ~C.~

Hi Y.,

I'm a former public school elementary teacher. Check out this site. This was mandatory.

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/teks/grade/Kindergarten.pdf

One thing is that they need to learn how to do journals every day (drawing), and how to be self-sufficient in certain areas.

I taught Kinder and these are some of the things we teach:

Lang. Arts and Phonics: letters, sounds ( vowel and consonants), syllables, rhyming, identifying how many words in a sentence, beginning sounds of a word and ending, WRITING THEIR NAME, sounding out words, blending letters to form words (c-at).

Math: identifying numbers (definetely to 20), shapes, 3d shapes, patterns, sorting, identifying ones, tens, and hundreds place, adding, subtracting, area, capacity, compaing a set of objects and identifying which has more and less.

The more they know the better. Kinder. teachers are now expected to have their students to a level D on reading by the end of the year. If students come in and do not know very much it is easy for them to get behind. Unfortuantely there is a growing amount of pressure on both the students and the teachers these days. If you need help with trying to find activities google Kinder. websites. A great link for literacy computer games is www.starfall.com I used this in my classroom and it is excellent!

C.