The kindergarten environment and its relationship to developing a child’s readiness to read
introduction
Preschool is an important stage in a child’s life, providing them with the opportunity to gain a wealth of experiences sufficient to develop their skills and aptitudes. Through this stage, we lay the foundation for the educational process across the various stages of education. Reading is one of the important skills that kindergarten contributes to instilling in children. Its importance stems from its being a fundamental skill that helps individuals acquire knowledge and expand their horizons. Kindergarten is an important stage in preparing children to master reading skills by providing them with a set of skills called pre-reading skills or reading readiness skills. One of the most important ways to build reading readiness in kindergarten is to create an environment rich in activities that the child can interact with and provide them with a variety of direct and indirect experiences and skills that contribute to building their reading readiness. A well-designed classroom environment, enriched with appropriate tools and materials, greatly supports children’s play, which in turn supports reading and writing skills. Therefore, the kindergarten environment and its programs must be based on tools and activities that are based on the principle of using the senses and play.
The concept of
The ability to read refers to the ability to complete a complex process involving multiple senses, along with the individual’s experience and knowledge. This ability to read encompasses the ability to perform multiple tasks, including seeing written words correctly, pronouncing them correctly, and understanding the intended meaning of those words. To perform these tasks, an individual requires complex and intricate skills, requiring certain organs to reach sufficient maturity, such as sight, hearing, and speech. Furthermore, these organs need to be trained and developed to perform their functions.
Reading readiness skills
Skills a child must master in preparation for reading:
- Visual skills, including:
– Recognizing the shapes of some letters and the shapes of some words.
– Visual discrimination: This includes visual discrimination between visual stimuli such as shapes, colors, and sizes, and visual discrimination between the shapes of letters and words.
– Visual recall: This refers to the child’s ability to retain in memory the visual stimuli they see.
– Visual locomotion (visual direction): This refers to the child’s ability to follow the correct reading direction (from right to left, and from top to bottom of the page).
- Auditory skills, including:
– The ability to distinguish between different sounds audibly.
– The ability to recognize letter sounds.
– The ability to distinguish between letter sounds audibly and word sounds audibly.
- Speaking skills, which include several skills, namely:
– Developing the child’s vocabulary (lexical vocabulary)
– The ability to speak in correct sentences.
– The ability to pronounce words and letters correctly.
Types of tools and equipment that should be present in the
- Special equipment and tools for inspirational play:
In this corner, children enact various social roles. This corner achieves important goals, including developing imagination and fostering verbal interaction between children. This corner is equipped with furniture, equipment, and tools that allow children to represent life inside and outside the family.
- Cognitive activity tools and equipment:
The most important tools in this corner are classification tools, which help children classify objects according to a specific characteristic, such as size or color, and matching tools, which help children match two objects that are equal in a specific characteristic, such as shape, size, or color. Among the goals achieved by this corner are developing children’s small muscles, developing visual discrimination skills, visual-manual coordination, and developing problem-solving skills.
- Building tools and equipment or cubes:
The primary activity children engage in in this corner is free building with cubes. Among the basic tools in this corner are a set of cubes, in addition to some wooden tools that stimulate the child’s imagination. This corner achieves several goals, including developing the child’s ability to visually distinguish and develop their ability to match, sequence, and muscle coordination, in addition to understanding concepts. Scientific methods such as weight and stability.
- Reading materials and equipment:
In this corner, children browse and read books, listen to a recorded story, reenact the story using puppets, and compose stories. The corner achieves several important goals, including developing children’s language skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking), developing their readiness to read, acquiring new concepts, and dealing with emotions and life experiences through listening to stories and dramatic play with puppets. Among the materials and equipment that this corner must be equipped with are: books of various types, recording devices with headphones, and tapes with recorded stories.
- Artistic Expression Tools and Equipment:
This corner aims to achieve several important goals, including helping the child express their feelings, training their small muscles, developing their self-confidence when completing their artwork, and discovering different colors. Setting up the corner requires providing materials and raw materials that the child can use for artistic expression, including various sized paintbrushes, dough and clay, threads, various papers, newspapers, and beads.
- Research and Discovery Tools and Equipment:
This corner aims to achieve several goals: learning about aspects of life and its natural resources, including living and inanimate objects, developing scientific thinking skills, and building a wealth of information and knowledge for the child.
The corner is equipped with natural tools such as insects, birds, stuffed animals, plants, various types of soil, pebbles, and rocks, snails and shells, and others. The corner is also equipped with tools such as magnets, lenses, and various scales. Care should be taken not to place all of these tools in the corner at once, but rather to change and adapt as experiences change.
For the materials used in kindergartens to achieve their educational goals, they must meet certain conditions, the most important of which are:
– They must be diverse to meet the different needs of children.
– They must take into account the ages and individual differences of children.
– They must be designed to be durable enough to withstand use for a reasonable period of time.
– They must be attractive to children and easy to use.
– They must be completely safe.
– These materials should preferably reflect the local culture.
conclusion
The most important way to build readiness for reading in kindergarten is to provide an environment rich in activities that the child can interact with and that provide him with a variety of direct and indirect experiences and skills that contribute to building his readiness for reading.
