Helping Your Child
Get Ready for School

with activities for children
from birth through age 5

Foreword

"Why"

This is the question we parents are always trying to answer. It's good that children ask questions: that's the best way to learn. All children have two wonderful resources for learning--imagination and curiosity. As a parent, you can awaken your children to the joy of learning by encouraging their imagination and curiosity.

Helping Your Child Get Ready for School is one in a series of books on different education topics intended to help you make the most of your child's natural curiosity. Teaching and learning are not mysteries that can only happen in school. They also happen when parents and children do simple things together.

For instance, you and your child can: sort the socks on laundry day--sorting is a major function in math and science; cook a meal together--cooking involves not only math and science but good health as well; tell and read each other stories--storytelling is the basis for reading and writing (and a story about the past is also history); or play a game of hopscotch together--playing physical games will help your child learn to count and start on a road to lifelong fitness.

By doing things together, you will show that learning is fun and important. You will be encouraging your child to study, learn, and stay in school.

All of the books in this series tie in with the National Education Goals set by the President and the Governors. The goals state that, by the year 2000: every child will start school ready to learn; at least 90 percent of all students will graduate from high school; each American student will leave the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades demonstrating competence in core subjects; U.S. students will be first in the world in math and science achievement; every American adult will be literate, will have the skills necessary to compete in a global economy, and will be able to exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship; and American schools will be liberated from drugs and violence so they can focus on learning.

This book is a way for you to help meet these goals. It will give you a short rundown on facts, but the biggest part of the book is made up of simple, fun activities for you and your child to do together. Your child may even beg you to do them. 

As U.S. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander has said: 

The first teachers are the parents, both by example and conversation. But don't think of it as teaching. Think of it as fun.

So, let's get started. I invite you to find an activity in this book and try it.

Diane Ravitch
Assistant Secretary and Counselor to the Secretary

Acknowledgements

This book has been made possible with help from the following people who reviewed early drafts or provided information and guidance: Teresa Grish, a Vienna, Virginia, homemaker; Sharon Lynn Kagan, Yale University's Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy; Evelyn Moore, National Black Child Development Institute, Inc.; Cynthia Newson, Women's Educational Equity Act Publishing Center; Douglas Powell, Purdue University; Heather Weiss, Harvard Family Research Project; Barbara Wilier, National Association for the Education of Young Children; E. Dollie Wolverton, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Lisa Hoffman and Johna Pierce, U.S. Department of Agriculture; Carolyn Pinney, a Minneapolis, Minnesota, preschool teacher; Marilynn Taylor, a St. Paul, Minnesota, freelance writer and editor; and many individuals within the U.S. Department of Education.

Special thanks to Leo and Diane Dillon for their advice on how to work with illustrators.

Nancy Paulu has been a writer and editor for the U.S. Department of Education since 1986 and is the author of several books on education reform for the Department. Previously, she was an assistant editor of the Harvard Education Letter and a newspaper reporter in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Quincy, Massachusetts. She has also been a commentator and interviewer on public television. She received her bachelor's degree from Lawrence University and a master's degree in education from Harvard as a Bush Leadership Fellow. She lives with her husband and young daughter in Washington, DC.

Annie Lunsford has been a freelance illustrator since 1975. Her works include a Children's Hospital calendar, a book for Ronald McDonald House, slide shows for the National Institutes of Health, and a Christmas card for Ringling Brothers. Her work has been recognized by The Advertising Club of New York, the Society of Illustrators, and The Printing Industry of America. Lunsford lives and works in Arlington, Virginia.