06/05/2026
** AN IMPORTANT READ ** 📚
It's VERY difficult to know the breakdown of all the academic skills required by children to know before school. This isn't common knowledge.
For example, to start understanding JUST mental addition, kids need to be able to first count to 100. Then they must learn what addition is fundamentally. We start with 1 plus 1. 1 plus 2, 1 plus 3, just so they understand the conceot of ADDING ON and what that means. Once we get a good grasp of this, they must memorize their 10 sets. 1 + 9, 2 + 8, 3 + 7 and so forth. They can do this with their fingers, your fingers or flash cards. Once they have this, they must recognize there is a pattern between 10s, but they need to see this on a hundreds chart first. A visual must be placed in the house and then visited nightly. Patterns here look like "6 to 16 to 26 to 36 all have a 6 at the end". Once they recognize this and have counted through them dozens and dozens of times to practise, the can start realizing that because 6 + 4 = 10, then 16 + 4 = 20. This must mean 26 + 4 = 30. This is where number sense starts to form. The visual for this skill can be done with number lines jumping 1s and by 10s. Of course, each one of these steps takes weeks and weeks to build and develop. Some of these skills were necessary decades ago as kids HAD to learn skills like to to participate in household chores such as cooking. Nowadays, it is very normal that these hundreds of hours of preloading can be missed. It is difficult to find this much time, in this era of life. But it is necessary as the scores in schools everywhere are dropping.
In a nutshell, when a group of kindergarten kids start school, they are 4years old and in some way, learning 2 year old skills. We start kids 2 years behind essentially. When behaviours, emotions, sick days, snow days, holidays, assemblies, etc are added into a school year, it is very normal that a large group of these kids aren't moving forward a full year at a time. By grade 1, a student may be 3 years behind already.
Working with our kids regularly, with intent can really help. It doesn't need to be as intense as mentioned above, but kids require exposure to academics.
