Kindergarten readiness checklist: skills experts say to practice now

How will you know if your child is ready for kindergarten? There are plenty of checklists, and yet no two are alike 🙃 That’s because there isn’t a universal standard for what children should know before kindergarten—readiness assessments can vary by state or even school district. The best thing you can do, development experts say, is look for opportunities for your child to practice skills in several key areas.

What kinds of skills is your pre-kindergartner developing?

At ages 4 and 5, your child’s interests play a large role in which skills develop first. To help get them ready for school, try to offer your pre-kindergartener play activities and tools across these six categories of skills:

• Executive function
• Social-emotional
• Language and communication
• Literacy
• Math and problem solving
• Fine and gross motor 

Below, you’ll find details about the skills that develop between ages 4 and 6 in each of these categories and ideas to help your child practice them. Remember that no kindergartener has mastered them all—each child has different strengths, interests, and experiences, making their development path as unique as they are ❤️

Executive function

Executive function is a broad set of skills including working memory, flexible thinking, and impulse control—all of which contribute to your child’s growing independence. Beginning around age 4, your child experiences the first of two developmental surges in executive function; the second spans adolescence to early adulthood. As your child prepares for kindergarten, they may:

• Quiet down after an active period
• Use self-regulation strategies—with your help—like deep breaths and self-talk
• Accept a change in a familiar routine
• Stay with an engaging task for 10 minutes without supervision
• Remain on task five to 10 minutes in a distracting environment like a classroom
• Carry out four simple related tasks in order: hang up their backpack, hang up their coat, come to the rug, and sit down
• Correctly use basic time words (yesterday, today, tomorrow)

Ways to support your child’s executive function development:

• Encourage them to follow multi-step directions, like helping with a recipe.
• Help your child make sense time and when events are happening with a tool like the Plan Ahead Week Board.
• Provide opportunities for your child to practice self self-care, like allowing them to brush their own teeth or pick out and put on their own pajamas. 
• Practice mindful breathing with your child; a tool like the Calming Circle and Breathing Activities Guide can help.

Social-emotional skills

Age 4 is an important year for social-emotional growth—the parts of your child’s brain linked with emotional self-regulation and language skills are growing rapidly. Your child may begin to better identify, name, and talk about their feelings and the feelings of others. As your child prepares for kindergarten, they may:

• Sometimes say “please,” “thank you,” and “I’m sorry” without a prompt
• Laugh at appropriate times
• Play with a group of three or more children 
• Be able to share their own possessions—sometimes 🙃
• Pass food and drinks at the table and ask for them to be passed
• Follow more rules 
• Show an understanding of right and wrong 
• Understand the difference between doing things on purpose and by accident 
• Comfort a sad or hurt playmate 
• Have imaginary friends 
• Experiment with lying 
• Cooperate with a request to be quiet
• Go along with the rules of a group during play

Ways to support your child’s social-emotional skills development:

• Help them identify and express their feelings. Books and games are great tools to help your child explore emotions. The Show, Tell & Think Empathy Game, for example, includes charades, impromptu storytelling, and “what ifs” related to emotions and social situations. 
• Teach your child ways to manage big feelings, like stopping to take a couple of deep breaths or go sit in a comfy chair when they’re upset. In the book “Charlie Learns Something New,” a young girl learns what frustration feels like and some ways to manage it. 
• Provide opportunities for them to play cooperatively with other children in pairs and small groups.
• Give them tasks to help out at home. The Daily Helper Board is a visual tool your child can use to keep track of their household contributions like setting the table or sorting their socks.

Language and communication skills

By the time your child starts school, you’ll likely have noticed a major improvement in their language skills, especially in social settings. Many 4-year-olds can hold longer conversations complete with pauses, sentences, turn-taking, and questions. The more vocabulary they have, the more fun they’ll have with words. As your child prepares for kindergarten, they may:

• String up to eight words together into a sentence
• Have a spoken vocabulary of 1,000 to 1,500 words and be able to understand around 4,000 words—though we wouldn’t recommend trying to count ❤️
• Tell you about something that happened during their day 
• Know and sometimes correctly use grammatical endings like “-ed” or “-ing” 
• Make up silly words 
• Ask questions constantly 
• Enjoy telling and retelling stories 
• Experiment with telling jokes 
• Compare their family’s rules with those of friends’ families
• Sometimes believe that their own thoughts can make things happen (“Tomorrow is my birthday!”)
• Tell long stories that are partly true and partly made up
• Talk about what might happen and what they would like to happen
• Speak clearly overall, perhaps with some incorrect sounds
• Recite from memory their name, age, gender, phone number, and address
• Stay on topic and take turns during a conversation
• Speak with inflection (excitement, surprise, etc.) when describing an event

Ways to support your child’s language and communication skills development:

• Encourage them to engage in pretend play and make up stories with props. Sets like the Wooden Modular Village & Pathways let children stretch and move around the room as they create scenes from above.
• Suggest they pick out books to read with you, and ask them questions about events in a book.
• Help them memorize important details like their address and your phone number.
• Prompt your child to share stories about their daily activities. For example, ask them to tell another family member what they did on a trip to the park or the grocery store. It can help to remind them of something exciting—”Oh! Grandma loves butterflies. Can you tell her about the one we saw today?”

Literacy skills

Most children learn to read after starting kindergarten, but many of the building blocks of reading and writing are falling into place now. You’ll see a wide range of abilities among your child’s peers—a few may already read while others might not recognize any letters at all. Follow your child’s lead, read books to them often, and continue offering ways for them to to experience sounds, words, and writing. As your child prepares for kindergarten, they may:

• Draw a person with at least eight of these body parts: head, body, eyes, nose, mouth, hair, arms, shoulders, legs, hands, and feet
• Be able to copy, write, and/or recognize some of the letters in their name
• Recognize some letter names
• Point to a word they know in a story that’s being read to them
• Make up rhymes
• Hold a writing utensil with three or four fingers rather than their palm
• Recognize some words they see frequently
• Retell a simple story they know well
• Match rhyming sounds
• Recognize the titles of some books

Ways to support your child’s literacy skills development:

• Point out words on street signs and labels to help them notice written language in their environment.
• Play rhyming games. Fun with rhyming is a great way to help your child recognize and work with sounds in spoken language, an important part of reading success.
• Store books, magazines, and other reading material where they can easily reach them.
• Encourage your child to pick out their own books at the library. 

Math and problem-solving skills

Don’t be surprised if your child often exclaims, “I have an idea!” Your pre-kindergartener’s growing cognitive and language skills can lead to more articulate expressions of curiosity. They often love to tinker, build, tape things together, and use their hands and mind at once to explore math and logic concepts. As your child prepares for kindergarten, they may:

• Count to 20 with some omissions and errors
• Count to 10 with one-to-one correspondence
• Recognize the numerals 1 to 5
• Sort objects by size, color, shape, or type
• Be able to name pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters
• Place up to four out-of-order illustrations in correct sequence
• Find one of five objects that doesn’t belong in the same category
• Recognize geometric shapes in the real world
• Understand that something is taller or smaller than something else
• Tell the difference between morning and afternoon
• Compare and contrast people by height, size, hair color, and other physical attributes
• Think in logical steps
• Understand that a picture or symbol stands for something real
• Put items in order from smallest to largest, shortest to tallest, and other contrasts
• Enjoy puzzles and logic games
• Recognize quantities up to four without counting, known as “subitizing”

Ways to support your child’s math and problem-solving skills development:

• Help them practice math skills in everyday life. Ask them to set the table for a specific number of people or compare different quantities of food, like a plate with two pieces of broccoli and a plate with five pieces of broccoli.
• Practice counting, adding, and subtracting during play. The Modeling Sand, Unit Block Builders & Activity Cards allow your child to build and visually explore number units.
• Explore your home with a measuring tape—this is a good way to visually demonstrate concepts like longer and shorter or wider and narrower. 

Fine and gross motor skills

Many “classic” childhood activities may capture your child’s interest around the time they start school. With improved coordination, they may be ready to learn how to ride a two-wheel bicycle with pedals, play hopscotch, jump rope, skip, and cut more precisely with scissors. 

You may also notice your child’s pencil grip begin to change. They may start moving away from a palmar grasp—a utensil wedged between palm and fingers—to a tripod or quadrupod grasp, which involves three or four fingers clasped around the tip. Some children might even begin experimenting with a dynamic tripod grasp, where each finger moves independently. This is how they’ll be taught to hold a pencil in school. As your child prepares for kindergarten, they may:

• Gallop
• Throw a ball overhand
• Hop 10 feet forward on one foot
• Cut along a line with scissors
• Cut out a small triangle and square with scissors
• Trace around their own hand
• Color within the lines of a circle 
• Perform basic paper-folding tasks
• Pour water without much of it spilling
• Be able to brush their teeth partially (but not entirely) on their own
• Be able to pedal and steer a bicycle
• Walk on a balance beam
• Get dressed with just a little help (zippers, snaps, and maybe buttons)
• More easily control big movements like stopping, starting, and turning
• Sometimes sit in a seat or stand in a line during an activity without extra movements
• While running, change direction without stopping
• Do a forward roll
• Be able to keep going on a swing after initial push by “pumping” their legs
• String beads to make a necklace
• Learn to jump rope

Ways to support your child’s fine and gross motor skills development:

• Let them practice their tripod or quadrupod grip and make the various horizontal, vertical, and curved strokes they’ll need to form letters with the Draw, Trace, and Erase Board.
• Encourage them to serve their own food and water with your supervision.
• Ask them to pick out and put on their own clothes to wear each day.
• Provide opportunities for them to dance, tumble, swim, jump rope, swing, play in sprinklers, climb on play equipment, or ride a bike. 

Learn more about the research

Ahmed, S. F., Ellis, A., Ward, K. P., Chaku, N., & Davis-Kean, P. E. (2022). Working memory development from early childhood to adolescence using two nationally representative samples. Developmental Psychology, 58(10), 1962–1973.

Cheng, C., & Kibbe, M. M. (2022). Development of updating in working memory in 4–7-year-old children. Developmental Psychology, 58(5), 902–912.

Heyman, G. D. (2008). Children’s critical thinking when learning from others. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(5), 344-347.

Hjetland, H. N., Brinchmann, E. I., Scherer, R., & Melby‐Lervåg, M. (2017). Preschool predictors of later reading comprehension ability: A systematic review. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 13(1), 1-155.

Lozy, E. D., Holmes, S. C., & Donaldson, J. M. (2020). The effects of paired kinesthetic movements on literacy skills acquisition with preschoolers. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 53(3), 1337-1353.

Lwin, S. M. (2016). It’s story time!: Exploring the potential of multimodality in oral storytelling to support children’s vocabulary learning. Literacy, 50(2), 72-82.
McClelland, M. M., & Cameron, C. E. (2019). Developing together: The role of executive function and motor skills in children’s early academic lives. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 46, 142-151.

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