FF 06: ‘School Readiness’ with Kate Highland

Learn school readiness for your kids with principal Kate Highland and Newcastle chiropractor, Dr. Dorte Bladt. Assistant principal Kate Highland shares with us how we can help our kids feel comfortable and confident as they enter a new and exciting phase of their lives: Big school. Intro: Flourishing Families with Dr. Dorte Bladt, the Switched-On Kids chiropractor and her passionate friends sharing the secret of inspiring wellness to help your families thrive. Dorte Bladt: I’d like to welcome Kate Highland today. Kate Highland is the Assistant Principal at Charlestown East School. I’m really excited to have you on and share with us about school readiness. Kate Highland: Okay, thank you, Dorte. Yes, my job here at Charlestown East – which is a government school, a public school in New South Wales – is I look after all of the children in kindergarten Year 1 and Year 2. A lot of what I do is bring them into the school. So all of those processes to do with orientation and easing their transition into school here. I give a lot of advice to a lot of parents about that and I run the Whitebridge Community of Schools Readiness Night. That happens around May every year where we invite parents to come along. They can ask questions and it’s a big information-sharing session. Some of the things I say there, at that session, are to do with having strong links with your preschool and taking advice from preschool teachers because they know your child and they know what they’re up to, they know their readiness levels and they’re the best person to give advice about readiness. We, of course, haven’t seen your child yet at that stage of the year. We look forward to getting to know them. But your preschool teacher will give you advice about things like how they’re holding a pencil, for instance, and the areas that they need correction. It’s also a good place to start making playdates with friends so that your children start to socialise and kindergarten, believe it or not, a lot of it is about socialisation and getting along with friends rather than academics. Dorte Bladt: That’s the most important thing, isn’t it? Kate Highland: Well, you would think so and that, obviously, is something that is vital and it is our main focus, but we also believe that for your child to be an independent, functioning human being later on in life, they need to be able to relate and communicate with each other and learn all of those things that are vitally important. A lot of times, skipping to the end of school, when children leave and we ask what it was that they really enjoyed about school, they’ll talk about kindergarten. They’ll talk about their friends. They don’t remember learning how to read. They don’t remember learning how to count. They remember their buddy, the person that helped them in the playground open their lunchbox. They remember creative arts performances. They remember being in a play.  They remember those sorts of things. So those human aspects are vital as well as the academics. Dorte Bladt: Well, preschool, when you think of it from preschool to kindergarten, it’s a great transition then of being, like you say, learning how to grab that pencil and how to make friends. So you’re building on that. Kate Highland: You’re building on those things, yes. So we look for lots of things in the children coming in. We look for people who can share, children who don’t demand to be first,