The First Day of Kindergarten – Reducing Your Child's Stress
"With any change that we experience in our lives, natural emotions such as anxiety can emerge. For children, this becomes more pronounced when starting at a new school," says Michelle Kees, Ph.D., a specialist in children's anxiety issues at The University of Michigan Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Clinic. Most kids can overcome their fears with the help of a parent, she says. Experts agree that in addition to helping your child learn basic skills such as the ABC's and counting, a key responsibility is to help your child visualize what will happen at kindergarten. The important thing is to build your child's expectations in ways that enable him or her to feel confident that they can handle the new experiences that kindergarten will bring.
The Blue Lake take on it:
We highly recommend Kindergarten Countdown – a short (18 minute) video from Educational Productions. This Oregon-based team has created award-winning video training materials that are widely used in school systems throughout the U.S. and Canada. The Kindergarten Countdown DVD follows real kids through a typical kindergarten day. The University of Michigan Health System Bulletin on reducing the stress of returning to school also has tips for elementary and middle school students.
In a January 2006 discussion we facilitated with moms about reading readiness, we heard “Kindergarten is the new first grade”. Many parents think that holding their child back a year will make them more successful in kindergarten - they have more early reading skills, better social training and less chance of being the “runt”. In both public and private schools, we see 5-year-olds in preschool and almost 7-year-old kindergartners. Is this really a good idea? A Department of Education study found that of 21,000 children who entered kindergarten in the fall of 1998, results for those who started late were mixed. By the end of first grade, the study found, the late starters were slightly more proficient than their classmates at reading, but less proficient in math.
