Why go to Preschool?

When considering preschool, you should first notice the difference between preschool and daycare. Daycare centers off care options for working parents. Typically centers will accept infants, toddler, and preschool and school age children.  The program will provide basic care, and some educational instructions. Some daycare centers have highly qualified teachers and offer classes as a part of their program.   A preschool offers early childhood instruction for 3 and 4 year old's.  Typically it’s a part day class, with highly qualified degree teachers in early childhood education. These classrooms follow a curriculum and focuses on the child development and getting them ready for kindergarten.  

There is no denying that offering a high quality preschool program will help prepare your child for kindergarten and beyond.   Children who attend high quality preschool typically have better social skills, pre-reading skills, expanded vocabulary, and understanding of basic math skills. Preschool programs focus on 5 area of development,  social emotional development, gross motor, fine motor, language, and cognitive.  The daily activities are planned to strengthen a child in each domain, to help them become ready for kindergarten.  

In preschool your child will build social emotional skills that will help them for school readiness.  Many children enter kindergarten with the needed cognitive skills, but lack social emotional development.  Preschool can help develop your child skills in the following ways

·         Identify emotions in themselves and others

·          Relate to others  in positive ways

·          Manage feelings of anger, frustration and distress when faced with a tough situation, like when another child takes a favorite toy.

·          Builds a love  for  learning and approach it enthusiastically

·         Pay attention, and work both independently and cooperatively in a structured classroom environment.

Preschool can be a wonderful opportunity for exploration, growth, and fun!  You should evaluate your family’s needs to decide what type of program would be best for you and your child.  High quality preschool builds lifelong learners, and helps to build social emotional skills which leads to kindergarten success.