6 things parents should pay special attention to when preparing their children for first grade

To prepare your child to be confident when moving to a new environment - the first year of school, parents need to pay attention to the following 6 things to prepare for their children:

1. Create excitement for children to love going to school

The first thing to prepare for your child is to have a love of going to school. Let your child choose their own school bag, desk, bookshelf, etc. according to their preferences. From there, your child will love sitting at the desk and will always be conscious of maintaining and taking care of their study corner.

Let your child get familiar with his school bag, school supplies, pens, and books. You can teach your child that an open pen is dangerous, so he should close it after writing. Teach your child how to open books, how to memorize, how to put books in the compartments of his bag, and how to wear his bag on his shoulder.

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Parents can take their children to the new school or class a few times before they actually go to school. Show them how the new class is different from the one at their preschool. Show them lovely objects in the new place, a banyan tree spreading its canopy like an umbrella to block the sun, a school drum that makes the sound "tung tung tung" to call the children into class or signal that it's time to play... Help your child feel that the new environment has many interesting things that are close to them.

When the school year begins, parents also need to pay attention to their children's schedules to prepare books and school supplies for each subject each day, avoiding children having to bring too many things to school every day.

After each class, parents need to ask their children about their friends and teachers, what they like or dislike most about school, to know how to help children be excited about going to class and gradually overcome difficulties.

2. Language development for children

Preparing language resources for children when entering grade 1 is extremely important. Children's language resources when entering grade 1 must ensure two requirements. First, children must express themselves so that others can understand. Second, they must understand what others say about topics close to their lives.

From a very young age, especially from the age of 3, is the most favorable time for children to develop language, parents should talk a lot with their children so that they have an environment to develop language. Parents should read stories to their children, especially Vietnamese comic books with large, beautiful drawings.

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This is very necessary for children to perceive pictures to have a rich symbolic capital about life, develop language, and help children gradually get used to remembering letters, numbers... Reality shows that children with good language ability will learn first grade more easily than other children.

3. Self-service skills for children

In fact, these skills are already formed in kindergarten. However, many parents still spoil their children and kindergarten teachers and nannies still sometimes do it for the children.

In primary school, teachers cannot help with this. Therefore, parents must spend time to train their children to be proficient in how to deal with situations at school, such as when they want to go to the toilet and how to go to the toilet by themselves, when they want to express their opinions... The most important thing is to help children integrate into the environment, increase their independence, know how to take care of their health, when to take off their clothes, put on their clothes, when to wash their hands...

4. Teach your child to get along with friends

When going to school, children really want to play with their friends because primary school children live on emotions. Therefore, parents should remind their children to play together with their friends, share toys and food with their friends from an early age so that they can always live in a group and not be isolated.

5. Train children's concentration, order and discipline

Nowadays, children are much smarter than children of the same age in the past due to good nurturing conditions and more information coming to them, but many children do not have an easy time when going to first grade because of their limited ability to concentrate.

Therefore, parents need to assign their children a task that they like to do by themselves for about 10-15 minutes. Or parents can do it together to encourage and motivate their children to focus on completing the task. This also means that children must have the willpower, perseverance, and purpose... to complete the assigned task.

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Teach children the ability to concentrate, so that they can quickly get used to the new learning environment. When children are at home, parents can create competitions such as the whole family telling stories to each other, practicing coloring to see who is more skillful, talking about topics close to the child for about 30 minutes...

Talk to your child every day with stories related to the school environment such as: keeping order in class, raising your hand to ask permission from the teacher when speaking or going out, lining up when entering the classroom, standing up to greet the teacher when entering the classroom, leaving the classroom...

6. Preserve and protect the image of teachers

For primary school children, teachers are idols, direct ideal “models” of children. Teachers are the only people in the world who are right for children. Therefore, when children go to first grade, if parents want to influence them, they should go through their children’s teachers.

You should talk to your teachers to better understand why they behave like that towards your children and coordinate the impact between family and school in educating your children.

For example, at school the teacher praises the child, at home the mother also praises the child, when the teacher reminds the child of a mistake, at home the mother also needs to remind the child. If there is a conflict between the education of the family and the school, the child is easily confused and does not know who to follow.

Parents need to be patient, not rush to rush the process of preparing their children for first grade, and should not impose their own subjective wishes on their children. Parents’ high expectations for their children’s academic performance, especially their focus on their children’s grades in first grade, are also a great pressure that makes children bored with studying.