All last month’s blog posts were about the different kindergarten readiness skills that kids can learn when camping. This month, I’ll focus on readiness for kindergarten activities that you can do at home. Think of your house, condo, apartment, or suite as a fully-equipped learning center. The only question is where to start?
No matter what’s on the agenda for today there are dishes. Washing the dishes or loading the dishwasher is a good time to name the various dishes 
and utensils and talk about them. Depending on the age of your little one, you may go beyond fork, knife, and spoon to wooden spoon or pickle fork. This builds vocabulary and helps for organizing things into groups.
While putting all the forks with the other forks or the spoons with the spoons seems like a fairly obvious skill to us, remember that this involves lots of thinking for kids. First, they have to check out if an item is the same or different and then match it other items. Categorizing is a very important skill. Once at school, kids will look at a letter or number and see if it is the same or different and match it to others. Bowls and plates are more varied and some may seem to belong to more than one group, too.
For fun, call a dish by the wrong name and watch for smiles and giggles. Humor is another concept that kids learn from experiences. This is like handing kids learning on a dish! Can you dish this up?