School Readiness Support
What is school readiness?
Every child reaches an age where they must attend school, but how do you know when they are ready? School readiness encompasses different aspects of children’s lives, such as cognitive, motor, and emotional skills (Head Start, n.d.)
Why is school readiness important?
School readiness is key to helping children thrive in a new, structured environment. As they adjust to routines, cognitive flexibility helps them adapt to changes, while social interactions foster emotional skills like empathy and self-regulation. Tasks like writing and cutting also support the development of fine and gross motor skills. The great thing is, that these essential skills can be built through play! Fun, engaging activities allow children to work on their cognitive, emotional, and motor skills naturally, setting them up for success in school.
School readiness skills
Fine Motor Skills
Definition: small movement skills that involve hand coordination, precision, and dexterity (The OT Toolbox, n.d.).
Activities:
Use Legos or wooden blocks to build different structures with your kids! This helps with hand strength, pincer grasp, and dexterity.
Complete puzzles (big peg, small peg, and no peg) with your kids! This helps with pincer grasp, hand-eye coordination, and hand strength.
Try drawing and coloring with your kids, and incorporate their favorite characters or objects to increase participation! This helps with forming a tripod grasp, letter formation, and hand-eye coordination.
Incorporate Playdough in play to create different things by rolling, stretching, and shaping! This helps to strengthen fingers and hands.
Make jewelry using beads or dry noodles and string! This helps develop the pincer grasp and hand-eye coordination.
Make art projects with your kids! Incorporate cutting using scissors, ripping paper, or folding to work on fine motor control and grasp.
Gross Motor Skills
Definition: large whole-body movement skills that involve coordination, balance, and fluidity (NHS Forth Valley, n.d.).
Activities:
Make obstacle courses that encourage kids to run, jump, crawl, and balance!
Play with various sizes of balls to throw, catch, or kick them back and forth with them! This helps improve coordination, bilateral integration, and balance.
Have a dance party with your kids - incorporate their favorite songs or play YouTube dance videos for them to follow! This helps with body awareness, coordination, and rhythm.
Take your kids to a playground to swing with them or climb on the playset! This promotes balance and increases body strength.
Sensory Processing Skills
Definition: how the environment is interpreted through the body's senses (Kid Sense, n.d.).
Activities:
Create sensory bins with different textures such as rice, beans, feathers, sand, or other small objects your child may like! This helps engage their sense of touch.
Have silly races where they hop like frogs, do wheelbarrow walking, push their sibling on a scooter, and more! This provides proprioceptive input.
Swing or spinning with your child could be on a swingset or a tire swing! This helps engage vestibular senses and support self-regulation.
Engage in food exploration - recreate your children’s favorite stories by using various textures and foods in a supportive atmosphere, check out an example below!
Self-Regulation Skills
Definition: ability to independently use strategies to calm and regulate self (Griffin OT, 2020).
Activities:
Make different sensory bins to help your child practice self-regulation skills. Sensory bins can include rice, beans, feathers, dry noodles, etc.
Give your child small fidgets, such as stress balls, fidget spinners, textured tools, and more, for on-the-go self-regulation.
Play emotion charades with your child to help with emotional recognition! Act out emotions such as happy, sad, mad, frustrated, tired, and more.
Do yoga with your child to teach them an exercise to help with self-regulation. Make it fun and follow a YouTube video where you do yoga with animals!
Social-Emotional Skills
Definition: understanding one’s emotions and how to manage them effectively (AOTA, 2013).
Activities:
Engage in multi-player board games with your child! This will help them learn turn-taking, teamwork, empathy, and self-regulation.
Encourage your child to play with other children or join group activities. Group activities will allow your children to play with others and practice skills such as teamwork, empathy, and self-regulation.
Cognitive and Executive Functioning Skills
Definition: processes that help with completing tasks, such as planning and organization (OT School House, n.d.).
Activities:
Play memory games, such as matching games or Simon Says with your child! This helps with attention, memory, and planning skills.
Introduce puzzles or logic tasks and complete these with your child! This helps with problem-solving, initiation, planning, and flexibility.
How Does This Help With School Readiness?
All of the skills learned in the activities above will help your child succeed in various aspects of school! Activities such as completing puzzles help with fine motor skills that will translate to success in writing or hand-eye coordination that will support completing homework or reading assignments. Other activities, such as obstacle courses and dance parties will help with coordination for participation in P.E. classes or navigating the classroom and following directions which is important during school times. Each of these activities, and many more, provide fun activities for your child that will help increase their skills for school!
References
AOTA. (2013). Social and emotional learning (SEL). American Occupational Therapy Association. https://www.aota.org/-/media/Corporate/Files/Practice/Children/SchoolMHToolkit/Social-and-Emotional-Learning-Info-Sheet.pdf
Griffin OT. (2020). Sensory regulation strategies - what are they and how can they help your child? Griffin Occupational Therapy. https://www.griffinot.com/sensory-regulation-strategies-what-are-they-and-how-can-they-help-your-child/#:~:text=Self%2Dregulation%20is%20the%20ability,to%20learn%20to%20self%2Dregulate.
Head Start. (n.d.). School readiness. Head Start Early Childhood Learning & Knowledge Center. https://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/school-readiness#:~:text=School%20readiness%20is%20foundational%20across,essential%20ingredients%20of%20school%20readiness.
Kid Sense. (n.d.). Sensory processing. Kid Sense. https://childdevelopment.com.au/areas-of-concern/sensory-processing/
NHS Forth Valley. (n.d.). Children’s occupational therapy. NHS Forth Valley. https://nhsforthvalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Gross-Motor-Skills-5-11.pdf
OT School House. (n.d.). Assessing executive function skills in school-based OT. OT School House. https://www.otschoolhouse.com/single-post/assessing-executive-function-skills-in-school-based-ot#:~:text=Executive%20functions%20are%20a%20set,emotional%20regulation%2C%20and%20flexible%20thinking.
The OT Toolbox. (n.d.). Fine motor skills. The OT Toolbox. https://www.theottoolbox.com/fine-motor-skills/#:~:text=Fine%20motor%20skills%20involve%20the,utensils%2C%20and%20manipulating%20small%20objects.