Camp Grandma #4 How to Prep for Kindergarten

At Camp Grandma, Little N is learning to form letters correctly. He’s exploring how language works and practicing basic reading. This is how we will prep for kindergarten.

There are so many wonderful free online resources to help. Merely download and print worksheets and sit the kids down to complete them.

We do our kindergarten prep work when Little N first arrives at Camp Grandma, while he’s fresh and focused. It might be just a half hour of work. When his interest wanes, I send him off to play with toys in the playroom and then we go on to another project afterwards.

Learning at Camp Grandma should be fun and an exciting journey of exploration–not a drag. So, I don’t push him; we go at Little N’s pace.

Author! Author! Make a Book Together

One way to keep kids jazzed about language and reading is to help them author their own books. Start with pictures torn from magazines (or if you don’t subscribe to any, use printouts of images found online). Let the child select their favorites and have them order the images into a cohesive story.

Producing a book takes creativity, imagination, and logic as the child pieces together a story based on the pictures selected. It’s best for the child to lay all the pictures on the floor, in the order they envision the story to unfold. They can reorder the pictures as needed as they work through their story idea.

Now have the child cut out the images–this challenges Little N’s small motor skills. Then use a glue stick to affix the pictures to printer paper. Gather up the pages in story order, insert them into plastic sheet protectors, and secure the sheets with metal binder rings.

In the past, I hand-wrote the children’s stories so I could record their thoughts quickly, as they dictated, but the books looked messy. Now I set up my laptop to type their thoughts as they voice them, then cut and paste the narrative into the book.

For more details on how to help your grandchild produce a book, check out this previous post.

Learning About Words

A mastery of language is an important developmental attribute to prep for kindergarten, but also an important life skill. When the kids use a particularly apt word to describe something during everyday conversations, I always stop to praise them by commenting, “That’s a great word!” I do this to encourage more nuanced communications.

We are working at understanding directional or positional words, such as, above, around, under, in, and so forth. He pretty much knows all the answers already. I found free worksheets that we can use for practice.

I also use the clothespin dolls Miss T and I made for further practice. Put the crayon between the two dolls. Put the crayon to the right of the two dolls. Put the crayon above the two dolls….

Developing Reading Skills

We’re reading Hop on Pop, a few pages at a time, to practice how to sound out words. Of course, we’ve read this book many times before; but now, Little N is having to read it himself. He needs the discipline to be able to look at each word and decode it; not guess from the pictures.

Little N doesn’t just sit and study at Camp Grandma. Follow next week as he learns how to run a cookie shop.

I love Hop on Pop because most of the words in it are simple, rhyming, and repetitive, so the text reinforces the sounds various letters make.

To help him, I’ve made Little N some flash cards, and I have him write the words on our Ikea whiteboard easel, which is also our painting easel and blackboard. This easel is one of the best all-time, $20 grandma buys.

We are also learning sight words, those frequently occurring English words that kids need to recognize by “sight.” Many are not spelled phonetically. From the website, Sight Words Game, I’ve downloaded the kindergarten sight words worksheets and we are working on them, a few at a time. You’ll find worksheets for a wide range of age levels, from preschool through eighth grade.

Prep for Kindergarten by Learning to Write

Little N can recognize and write all the letters of the alphabet, but he doesn’t write them in the accepted manner. For example, he might start the “O” from the bottom, then work his way up and around.

I love this Scholastic Wipe-Clean Workbook to practice ABCs, numbers, and sequencing. There are arrows on each letter and number to guide the child through the writing steps. The book comes with a black pen, but I bought a box of dry erase markers in many colors to keep little N more engaged. Because you can wipe off the markings with a tissue, the book can be used over and over again.

You can also find free printable worksheets that provide the same kind of exercises; however, they are one-use only, so you’ll have to print up a bunch of practice sheets.

Little N is a veteran of preschools, so kindergarten won’t be a particularly big adjustment for him. However, any little exercises we can do at Camp Grandma to jumpstart his learning can only help him to get up to speed fast.

News from Camp Grandma

Next week, Little N learns how to run a cookie shop.

Every Wednesday, for the next two weeks, I’ll share what we did at Camp Grandma and how it went–what worked, what didn’t, and what I learned. You’ll find ideas for one-off activities to do with the grandkids or to incorporate into a complete, Camp Grandma program.

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