Preschool Readiness Checklist
Are you thinking about sending your child to preschool? Do you wonder if your child is ready for preschool? The preschool readiness checklist is here to help you out!
My experience as a mom and preschool teacher has helped me understand what skills children need to have before entering the preschool classroom.
At the bottom of the post, you’ll find a printable preschool readiness checklist.
The suggestions I’m sharing are for preschool children, around age 4. Like with any checklist, these are my recommendations and this should be used as a guideline. If your child doesn’t have every single skills mastered, that is ok! This just gives you something to start working towards.
I want to emphasize that I believe social-emotional skills are the most important skills to work on before sending your little one to the classroom. If your child has amazing academic skills, that is fantastic! But I truly believe that children need to be ready socially and emotionally first.
Here are the categories that the skills are broken down into:
- self-care
- social-emotional
- communication
- gross motor
- fine motor
- cognitive
Self-Care Skills
It is very important that your child has self-care skills before going to a classroom. If your child isn’t potty trained, that makes it incredibly hard for the teachers. Here are the self-care skills preschool children should have:
- uses the bathroom independently (yes, that means wiping themselves!)
- washes and dries hands
- is able to dress themselves
- can put on a coat (or is starting to do this independently!)
Social-Emotional Skills
Social-emotional development is essential to a young child’s sense of well-being. Children learn these skills by interacting with peers, observing, and relationships with family members. Here’s what I recommend:
- interacts with peers
- able to share and take turns
- expresses feelings and needs
- able to independently play
- can separate from parents for a couple hours
- able to wait for a few minutes
- cares for school materials (ex: doesn’t draw on the walls or destroys toys)
- listens while others speak
- is polite to peers and adults
- helps classmates
- follows 1-2 step instructions
Communication
Is your child a chatter box, quiet, or somewhere in between? Here are the communication skills children should have:
- speaks in complete sentences
- can speak clearly
- sings simple songs with an adult
- responds to verbal cues
- seeks help when needed
- converses with other children
Gross Motor Skills
Gross motor skills are the abilities required to control the large muscles of the body for movements such as crawling, walking, jumping, and skipping. Here’s what a preschooler should be able to do:
- can run without tripping or falling
- maintains balance in everyday tasks
- uses both sides of the body to perform bilateral tasks
- jumps with two feet
- can gallop
- can skip
- rides a tricycle
Fine Motor Skills
Fine motor skills require the use of smaller muscle groups to perform tasks that are precise in nature. These are a lot harder for preschoolers to master since their hands and muscles are still developing. Here are the skills preschoolers should have:
- shows hand-eye coordination with building blocks and simple puzzles
- open and closes scissors
- begins to show hand preference
- draws horizontal and vertical lines
Cognitive
Like I mentioned above, I truly believe social-emotional skills are so important and the academic skills will follow. Here are some skills that would be great to have before going to preschool:
- identifies some colors
- recognizes a few basic shapes
- is starting to count
- matches objects
- sorts objects by color
- understands that words convey a message in a story
- recognizes the first letter of their name
- knows some letter names
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