Families play key roles in shaping children's early development. Some family factors that can influence school readiness include:

• Economic risk: Children from economically disadvantaged families often exhibit lags in the development of readiness skills.
• Stability: Children from stable two-parent homes tend to have stronger school readiness than children from one-parent homes and from homes where caregivers change frequently.
• Enriched home environment: Children from homes where parents talk with their children, engage them in conversation, read to them, and engage in forms of discipline such as time-out that encourage self-discipline have stronger readiness skills.

What Can Parents Do to Help Prepare Children for School?

Young children vary a great deal in their development of skills needed for school success. This is normal, and many children will not have developed to the level of others at the same age. Nevertheless, parents can help their children develop the skills they will need to be ready for school. The following list is a collection of activities that parents can do with their children to increase their child's general readiness for school:

• Read books to and with your child.
• Spend time with your child, including playing, cuddling, and hugging.
• Create and enforce a routine that your child needs to follow within your home (such as times of meals, naptimes, and bedtimes).
• Take time to talk to your child.
• Encourage and answer questions from your child.
• Encourage informal reading and counting activities at home.
• Promote your child's intellectual development by showing and encouraging your child to think about the world around them.
• Promote play that helps develop literacy (alphabet and beginning reading skills), counting and number awareness, problem-solving, creativity, and imagination.
• Ensure opportunities to develop social skills through playgroups or more formal preschool activities.
• Encourage behaviors that demonstrate respect, courtesy, and sharing (taking turns).
• Encourage children to accept responsibility and build independence through simple chores such as putting toys away and picking up clothes.

Promoting Readiness to Read

Children's readiness to read, in particular, has gained greater attention from educators recently owing to research that demonstrates the importance of early reading to later school success.

Children are ready to read when they have developed an ear for the way words sound, can identify and distinguish different sounds, can blend sounds, and can identify sound units in words. Together these skills are called phonological awareness, and they usually emerge in children between ages two and six. Children with good phonological awareness skills usually learn to read quickly. Children who are poor readers often have weak phonological skills.

There are many things that parents can do to promote phonological awareness and improve their child's readiness to read:

• Read nursery rhymes, sing songs, and clap along with the rhythm
• Play games with words that sound alike as you experience them in everyday life ("We're passing 'Mike's Bikes,' that's a funny name because they sound alike!")
• Demonstrate how sounds blend together in familiar words ("Let's sign your name on Grandma's card, T-o-m --- Tom.")
• Play a game where the goal is to find objects with names that begin with a certain initial sound; this is a great game for walks or car rides
• Play clapping games where you clap with each distinct sound ("'C-a-t' is a three clap word; so is 'fam-i-ly.'")

In addition to building phonological awareness, parents can also build the following comprehension skills:

• Attending to short stories by reading short, high interest books and reading the same favorites over and over
• Connecting story and titles by predicting the story from the title
• Making predictions about stories and following simple plots by asking questions while reading ("What's going to happen now?") and allowing children to retell stories
• Communicating feelings and ideas by allowing children to talk and tell stories even when they do not appear to make much sense.

Another important readiness skill that helps children learn to read is called print awareness . Print awareness means that the child:

• Knows the difference between pictures and print
• Recognizes print in the community (stop signs, McDonald's, Wal-Mart)
• Understands that print can appear alone or with pictures
• Recognizes that print occurs in different media (pencil, crayon, ink)
• Recognizes that print occurs on different surfaces (paper, computer screen, billboard)
• Understands that words are read left to right
• Understands the lines of text are read top to bottom
• Understands the purpose of white space between words
• Understands that print corresponds to speech word-for-word
• Knows the difference between letters and words

Parents can build print awareness by pointing out print as distinct from pictures in everyday life (e.g., "That's a sign for 'women.' That says 'women.'); pointing out store and restaurant marquees; pointing out print with and without pictures (e.g., "Here's a page with just words!"); pointing out words written in different media and on different surfaces (e.g., "Look, someone wrote on that wall with spray paint!"); occasionally tracing words with your finger as you read; noting that we begin reading at the top (Point to the top and say, "Here's where we start!"); playing "find the word" games with your child; and teaching the alphabet via songs and rhymes and talking about which letters make up familiar words.

Children also need to learn book handling skills such as orienting a book correctly and recognizing the beginning and the end. Giving children their own books or letting them take books from the local library helps. Allowing children to hold books while being read to and asking them to open the book at the beginning and close the book at the end of the story also teaches book handling skills.

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