Teacher Explains ABCs of Kindergarten : Her Handbook Helps Parents to Prepare Children for School

Parents of preschool children always had worries and questions, the teacher recalled.

“Usually, the questions would come too late, after the child had already been in kindergarten for a year,” said Michelle Prentice-Smith, a Yorba Linda kindergarten teacher for the past 15 years.

“So I’d go home and talk to my husband and tell him how frustrated I was in getting information to the parents. And he said, ‘Write a book to help the parents.’ He kept after me to do that, and so about a year and a half ago, I started writing such a book.”

The result is a handbook by Prentice-Smith for parents of children from ages 4 to 6. The book, self-published this spring, is titled “Ready or Not.” The name aptly suggests a main theme--and worry--of the 48-year-old author, a mother of three grown children herself and the grandmother of two.

“Children need to be ready for preschool and kindergarten,” Prentice-Smith said. “Almost all parents say, ‘Oh, my child is so smart,’ and, of course, the child probably is. But often the child is only showing verbal skills. There has to be a balance. Basically, what all the developmental experts talk about is the balance needed between the chronological, the behavioral, the social, the emotional and the intellectual. You put all those together, and that’s what you look at in the ‘ready child.’ ”

Prentice-Smith believes that her book is a common-sense approach to helping parents help their preschool toddlers. “Instead of a parent having to read through many thick books about problems, I tried to take a Reader’s Digest approach and condense the material into easy reading,” she said.

Its purpose as defined on Page 1 is to present “an overview of readiness skills . . . specifically designed to put YOU, the parent, in charge of your child’s development.”

Prentice-Smith, who received her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Cal State Fullerton in 1972 and her master’s in education there in 1976, said her book is a distillation of 15 years of experience as a kindergarten teacher at Mabel Paine School in Yorba Linda. It also reflects some experiences with her own children.

“All three of my children were fall babies, and they all started kindergarten too early, I now realize,” she said. “When I look back on it, I also started kindergarten too early.

But in those days, kindergarten was sandbox and clap your hands and games. Parents today don’t realize how learning has changed. Preschool is now what kindergarten used to be, and kindergarten is what first grade used to be.”

While she vigorously opposes pushing children before they are ready to learn, her own kindergarten classes show the great advances in kindergarten-age teaching and learning. Students in her classes, for example, learn to use computers and also write stories and poems.

Prentice-Smith stressed that such learning can only take place if a child is ready. But parents can help make sure their children have some of the readiness skills, she said. “Parents are the first teachers. Children love to listen to their parents. And they watch their parents. If the parent reads, the child will want to try to read.”

The book offers a range of suggestions and ideas for encouraging preschoolers to be ready for classroom situations. Its “basic readiness skills checklist” for kindergarten has 25 items, including checking whether prospective kindergarten children know their phone numbers and street addresses and can recognize numbers 1 through 10 in random order.

Wants Change in Law

Prentice-Smith said California’s minimum entrance age for kindergarten age must be increased. Current law allows 4-year-olds to enter kindergarten in September as long as they will be 5 by Dec. 2. “I think the law should be changed so that a child has to be 5 by the previous June in order to enter in September,” she said. “Those six months make a very, very big difference.”