Book Review: Let's Get Ready for First Grade!

I have been volunteering an hour each week in my son's kindergarten class this year, and let me tell you, the pace is staggering. From the moment these five and six-year olds arrive at school, they experience a multi-sensory barrage of stimuli designed specifically to nurture their growing brains.

Based on my observations, it may well be true that everything you need to know you learn in kindergarten. Too bad parents like me didn't have this same experience. I'm pretty sure I worked on my cutting and gluing skills for a solid year before I even considered tackling geometric shapes or short vowel sounds.

Thankfully, parents like me have the kindergarten cliff notes, a book called Let's Get Ready for First Grade that helps us reinforce our children's learning just in time for the rigors of first grade.



Each colorful, dry-erase page of this book provides a snapshot of the kindergarten curriculum - though admittedly, many school districts, including my own, have their own specific standards.

But the basics are the same across the board: consonants and vowel sounds; word families (hop/pop/flop); compound words; punctuation; contractions. There's counting by ones and twos and tens, and even some simple number stories prompting children to add and subtract. I found the pages on money values to be particularly timely, since my son's class has been studying coin values and playing coin games for the past few months.

In this busy busy age when we're all barraged with multi-sensory stimuli not necessarily designed to nurture our growing brains, books like Let's Get Ready for First Grade restore our focus by showing us exactly how we can help our children succeed.

My son's kindergarten teacher agreed: "It's a great resource for parents. It's succinct...(parents) can wrap their arms around it."

If you're interested in learning more about the book, click here. And if you're interested in winning a free copy of the book, go here and leave a comment.