One of the most powerful activities that you can do at home to help develop your child’s kindergarten readiness is to read books and share stories. How about a Reading Olympics? Each day set aside a few minutes to either read to your child or tell a story. To earn a gold medal, read 3 times every day. A silver medal is two books or stories and a bronze would be one book a day.
To make a medal, a juice can lid is just about the right size. Trace around it on some paper and let your child use paint or crayons to color it. Sometimes grownup hands need to help with the cutting. You can decide if there’s a medal for each day that you read, or just one for the week.
Reading encourages all kinds of brain connections for using language and thinking. Children who have been read to at home will have an astonishing total of about 5000 books by the time they start school. That sounds impossible but 3 books a day is more than one thousand in a year. Just think of how those few minutes a day can add up to a tremendous amount of brain stimulation for a child. Can you and your child have some gold-medal fun and learning?